About Tamil, etc.

[Robert Zydenbos]

Am 1 Nov 2000, um 17:20 schrieb André 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 für Indologie und Iranistik