Content deleted Content added
|
|
|
The forms of some of the letters were simplified in the 19th century to make the script easier to typeset. In the 20th century, the script was [[Simplified Tamil script|simplified even further]] in a series of reforms, which regularised the vowel markers used with consonants by eliminating special markers and most irregular forms.
==Relationship with other Indic scripts==
The Tamil script differs from other Brahmi-derived scripts in a number of ways. Unlike every other Brahmic script, it does not regularly represent voiced or aspirated [[stop consonant]]s as these are not [[phoneme]]s of the Tamil language even though voiced and fricative [[allophone]]s of stops do appear in spoken Tamil. Thus the character {{lang|ta|க் }} ''k'', for example, represents {{IPAslink|k}} but can also be pronounced [{{IPA|g}}] or [{{IPA|x}}] based on the rules of [[Tamil phonology]]. A separate set of characters appears for these sounds when the Tamil script is used to write Sanskrit or other languages.
Also unlike other Brahmi scripts, the Tamil script rarely uses [[typographic ligature]]s to represent conjunct consonants, which are far less frequent in Tamil than in other Indian languages. Where they occur, conjunct consonants are written by writing the character for the first consonant, adding the ''puḷḷi'' to suppress its inherent vowel, and then writing the character for the second consonant. There are a few exceptions, namely {{lang|ta|க்ஷ}} ''kṣa'' and {{lang|ta|ஶ்ரீ}} ''śrī''.
[[ISO 15919#Overview|ISO 15919]] is an international standard for the transliteration of Tamil and other Indic scripts into Latin characters. It uses diacritics to map the much larger set of Brahmic consonants and vowels to the Latin script.
== Letters ==
|
