Re: [WMASTERS] Initial voiced stops.

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AnbinG Hart
 In a message dated 07/10/97  21:34:56, you write:
<< 
 Selva writes,
<<
I am writing this in my love for Tamil and English.

The name of the language shold give respect for the sounds they generate.
So in English "ng" and "sh" should not be represented with diacritics.
In English, the letter "h" at majority of the instances is not an h, but a
diacritic.
Similarly g, n, .. becomes diacritics.

As for Tamil, there are many sounds in use, that could only be cognised but
not explicitly written down. I could sight many examples. The simplest would
be, When we say " ka, sa, da, tha,..." and " ik, ich, id, ith ..." how do we
recognise the "sa" and "ich" from the same graphical representation.

I shall declare my beleive that "The brain cognises graphic as its
fundermental process and the alphabets are only tools for assiting this
recognition".

In Tamil, we should have a mean to clearly assist this recognition. I propose
diacritics as oppose to additional characters. With diacritics, we will not
need to change the spelling of nearly half of the Tamil words in future. eg,
If we take  "makkan", and "mahan"  we still be writing "mak^an".

Nantry
--------------------------------------------------------------------- 
 >       Tamil does *not* have J, G, and such voiced stops at the
 >       *beginning* of a word. Tamils are aware of many sounds and
 >       sound sequences but they don't include all of them.
 >       To say they that they have is similar to saying, 'Oh
 >       there are many in America who speak English who have 'zha'
 >       in their name and so English should have a representation.
 >       English *has* zha and even the way americans pronounce
 >       'american' has some slight similarities.. Or to say 'Oh
 >       English has a word 'pariah' and we should include a new
 >       symbol for hard 'r'. English *has* what we call in tamil
 >       'vallina Ra'.
 
 Sorry, Selva, but initial stops can be traced back to Old Tamil and even
 Proto-Dravidian.   However, they only occur in onomatopoetic words -- Prof.
 Emeneau and my wife have written a paper on this, and the evidence is quite
 clear.  It is common for languages to use unusual sounds in onomatopoetic
 words or deictic words.  A famous example is English: only in deictics is
 initial "th" voiced.  Similarly in Russian, only in deictic words ("this")
 does an initial "e" occur initially.  (etot, "this").
 
 In any case, for a modern linguist, the language is what is actually
 spoken, not what was codified over 2000 years ago.  Modern Tamil most
 certainly has voiced initial stops -- e.g. gavani, bayam, etc.  Mostly in
 borrowed words, but they are used all the time in spoken Tamil.  Hal is
 making the sensible argument that the Tamil writing system should reflect
 modern Tamil, not Tamil as it was (for the most part) several millenia ago.
 The same argument has been made countless times, without effect, for
 English -- it makes very little sense to write "night" when we say "nite."
 The "gh" was pronounced in Chaucer's time (e.g. modern German Nacht).  G.
 Hart
 GH
 
 
 
 
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