About Tamil, etc.

[Lakshmi Srinivas]

--- Robert Zydenbos <zydenbos at GMX.LI> wrote:
> Am 1 Nov 2000, um 17:20 schrieb Andr� Signoret:
>
> > As far as I can see, Tamil (we say also Tamoul in
> France, Gott weiss
> > warum) [...]
>
> This is because the pronunciation of the vowel that
> is represented
> by the grapheme 'i' (in transliteration,
> corresponding to a Tamil
> grapheme) is influenced by the following retroflex
> voiced fricative
> and therefore does not sound like an 'i' to the
> average speaker of
> French. And actually the final 'l' would better have
> been written 'r';
> but European languages do not have that phoneme, and
> given the
> choice between r and l, it somehow became customary
> to write 'l'
> (perhaps also because in the pronunciation of some
> Tamil
> speakers, the fricative becomes a lateral. And in
> later Kannada and
> Telugu, this sound became replaced by the retroflex
> lateral).
>
> It is the problem of what to do when you write words
> from another
> language in a script that was designed for a very
> different language.
> (Cf. the common Indian usage of transliterating the
> alveolar 't' and
> 'd' of European languages as retroflexes.) French
> 'tamoul' is not
> really worse than English 'Tamil'.
>
>
> Robert Zydenbos
> Institut f�r Indologie und Iranistik


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