Wednesday 27 June 2012


The earliest known Tamil inscriptions date back to at least 500 BC. The oldest literary text in Tamil, Tolkāppiyam, was composed around 200 BC. The Tamil alphabet is is thought to have evolved from the Brahmi script, though some scholars believe that its origins go back to the Indus script.
The alphabet is well suited to writing literary Tamil, centamil. However it is ill-suited to writing colloquial Tamil, koduntamil. During the 19th century, attempts were made to create a written version of the colloquial spoken language. Nowadays the colloquial written language appears mainly in school books and in passages of dialogue in fiction.

Notable features

  • Type of writing system: syllabic alphabet
  • Direction of writing: left to right in horizontal lines
  • When they appear the the beginning of a syllable, vowels are written as independent letters.
  • Some of the non-standard consonant-vowel combinations are not used in official documents.
  • The alphabet was originally written on palm leaves. As a result, the letters are made up mainly of curved strokes which didn't rip the leaves.

Used to write:

Tamil (தமிழ்), a Dravidian language spoken by around 52 million people in Indian, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Vietnam, Singapore, Canada, the USA, UK and Australia. It is the first language of the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, and is spoken by a significant minority of people (2 million) in north-eastern Sri Lanka.

Online Tamil lessons
Sinhala and Tamil word and letter puzzles
http://panther.lk/toys/toys.asp?ToysCat=5
Association for Tamil Computing
http://www.kanithamizh.org
PDF Text - an online Unicode word processor for Tamil and English
http://www.pdstext.com
Tamil translation
http://dobashtrans.weebly.com/ 


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