The Tamil variety spoken by the Hebbar Iyengar community of Karnataka (henceforth ‘Hebbar Tamil’ or ‘HT’) is a minority language variety (no reliable statistics; unofficial estimates ~ 50,000 speakers) traditionally spoken in southern Karnataka, where the majority of community members still reside. Based on community legends that describe their out-migration from Srirangam town in present-day Tamil Nadu and subsequent settlement in and around Melukote town in present-day Karnataka, it is hypothesised that Hebbar Tamil split from Middle Tamil (the basis for Literary Tamil or ‘LT’) around the 13th century AD. This has meant that HT has developed independently of modern Spoken Tamil (ST) in Tamil Nadu. *** HT has been most significantly influenced by standard Kannada, which is the majority language spoken in the community’s traditional areas of residence. However, Kannada influence on the language has remained largely lexical; the core vocabulary of HT including function words and pronouns, person-number-gender (PNG) and tense-aspect-mood (TAM) markers remain perceptibly of Tamil origin. That said, pronouns and grammatical markers in HT have indeed undergone some degree of phonetic change, such that they are no longer identical to their counterparts in modern ST. *** This paper will compare and contrast pronouns and PNG-TAM markers in HT with those in LT and ST. This will include, among other things, a comparison of the divergent evolution of LT word-final nasal stops on pronouns and grammatical markers in HT and ST, e.g. (i) LT <nāṉ> --> ST /nãː/, HT /naːnʉ/ ‘I’, but (ii) LT <pōkirēṉ>  ST /poːrɛ̃ː/, HT /poːreː/ ‘I go’ *** It will also discuss the concept of surface and underlying forms, namely the variation in phonetic forms of a grammatical marker with and without morphological suffixes, e.g. (i) LT <paṇṇukiṟāṉ> --> ST [pɐɳɳʉrɑ̃ː], HT [pɐɳɳʉrʊ] ‘he does’, but (ii) LT <paṇṇukiṟāṉā> --> ST [pɐɳɳʉrɑːnɑː], HT [pɐɳɳʉrɑːnɑː] ‘does he do?’

1999

Tamil and other South Dravidian languages are somewhat unique in that they possess three phonological contrasts in the area of what are usually referred to as r-like segments (continuants, trills, flaps, etc.) as well as two contrasts in the lateral area. Because of an unfortunate lack of uniformity in the transcriptional systems that have been used to describe these segments, and because of other tendencies that are difficult to group under one rubric, the question of what is an "r" and what is not an "r" has been historically unclear. It is the goal of this paper to attempt to clear up the question of both the phonetics and the phonology of continuants and laterals in Tamil and to some extent in the other South Dravidian languages that have similar contrasts.

2025

The study of ‘Linguistics as a subject’ has gained importance in Europe since the beginning of 19th century; now it has been well established among the scholars and academicians world-over and has attained the level of ‘Higher Research’. However, the study and research by linguists are around English and other European languages. Tamil is one of the ancient languages of the world; its history surpasses that of the languages like the Sumerian and Akkadian, which are non-existent now while Tamil is a living language. It has a large treasure of grammar and literature commencing from the first millennium B.C. However, its grammar has received less attention from the linguists. The aspects of Phonetics, Phonology, Morphology and Syntax have been well explained in Tamil, in its grammar work Tholkᾱppiyam. Linguistic aspects of Tamil, if learnt by the Universities and Students, it will be of enormous help for the study of Linguistics as a subject. This paper is an attempt to elaborate the Phonetical and Phonological aspects of Tamil

India is a tableau of languages, cultures, faiths, even so-called races and one comes across striking richness of sound-systems in Indic languages. The present essay attempts to demonstrate that despite multiplicity and diversity of languages across various regions in the country, there is a strong element of commonality in the employment of phonological segments across Indic. There is rich material available on the ground for young researchers desirous of pursuing phonological investigations across Indic. The field is open to exploring segmental phonology, morpho-phonology, tonology, 'tone-Sandhi', stress assignment patterns, and other aspects of phonology.

The earliest written records available on the sub-continent come to us from Sanskrit; in fact RgVeda is regarded as the earliest knowledge-text available to mankind. The Indo-Aryan languages, the descendents of Sanskrit, are spoken across South Asia from Afghanistan to Sri Lanka along side scores of languages of at least three other major language families. A great deal of convergence has taken place among these languages from different stocks over the last over three millennia and they continue to co-exist while maintaining their independent genetic affiliations.

Studies in Linguistics and Literature, 2021

The paper provides a partial phonological and phonetic description of the segmental system of L2 Telugu English (TE). Previous research on the subject has been carried out in the context of a more general notion of Indian English (IE), so the properties of TE as distinct from other varieties of IE (e.g., Gujarati English) have largely remained unexplored. We have primarily focused on areas that previous research identified as prominent issues in the study of IE: vowel inventory and production, representation and realization of liquids, word-final obstruent phenomena, and allophones of /w/. To account for these aspects of TE, we have combined a generative approach to the study of an individual's linguistic competence with linguistic fieldwork as a means of collecting first-hand data. On the basis of collected data, we have conducted a spectrographic analysis of TE vowels and a distributional analysis of TE consonants. The paper provides the first description of the acoustic spaces of TE vowels. We found that all vowels except [ɔ] and [i] are more central in TE than in General American English. /r/ was realized as either [r] or [ɻ] without a specific pattern, and occasionally as [ɽ] in the intervocalic position. /l/ was realized as [ɭ] in word-final position and as [l] elsewhere. TE displayed word-final obstruent devoicing for all obstruents except for /b/, which was consistently unreleased. /w/ was realized as [ʋ] before front vowels and as [w] elsewhere. While previous research that concentrated on the broad notion of Indian English recognized the issue of /w/-allophony, it has not provided a principle that governs the exact distribution of /w/'s allophones. By combining the generative framework with linguistic fieldwork, we have accounted for this long-standing puzzle with a single rule: /w/ → [ʋ] / __ [-CONS, -BACK].

2004

Paris 7, UMR 7597 [HTL], FR2559 [TUL]) This paper uses the standard UNICODE encoding.

1972

Recently there was a controversy among the Ceylon linguists, writers and teachers on the use of colloquial style in literary works. The history of this controversy is worthy of notice. For many centuries, there has been an active relationship between the Ceylon Tamil scholars and their counterparts in Tamil Nadu. Ceylon Tamil scholars like Arumuka Navalar, Thamotharam Pillai, Kathiravel Pillai, Swami Vipulananda, were honoured in Tamil Nadu. Swami Vipulananda was highly honoured for his scholarship by being offered the Chair of Tamil in Annamalai University. He was privileged not only to be the first Tamil to become a Professor of Tamil at Annamalai University, but also to be the first Ceylonese to hold that post. Indian Tamil scholars have always been welcomed in Ceylon. The relationship that existed was so much related that the Ceylonese began calling the South Indian Tamil territory as ta:yna:tu ('mother land') and Ceylon Tamil territory as se:yna:tu (child's land). Until the middle part of this century, Ceylon Tamils consciously or unconsciously have thought that their 'mother land' is Tamil Nadu. But during the mid-fifties of this century, Ceylon Tamils began to recognize that Ceylon is their homeland and the struggle for their language rights in the island strengthened this national feeling. Ceylon scholars began to think in terms of 'Ceylon tradition' 'here in this place' and says: "The voiceless velar stop is palatalised into 'c' on account of the front high unrounded vowel ". We are not told whether this is a general feature in the dialect or it applies only in this instance. His paper contains many statements of this sort, which, although they have the appearance of general statements, are in fact not so. Zvelebil was the first to make an attempt to describe all the major dialects of Ceylon Tamil. Since he had attempted to do this task in a short paper, there is a possibility for him to confuse a feature of one dialect with that of the

India is a tableau of languages, cultures, faiths, even so-called races and one comes across striking richness of sound-systems in Indic languages. The present essay attempts to demonstrate that despite multiplicity and diversity of languages across various regions in the country, there is a strong element of commonality in the employment of phonological segments across Indic. There is rich material available on the ground for young researchers desirous of pursuing phonological investigations across Indic. The field is open to exploring segmental phonology, morpho-phonology, tonology, 'tone-Sandhi', stress assignment patterns, and other aspects of phonology.