The author of this rather provocatively titled slim book, an ornithologist by profession and training, is clear about his objective: to draw attention to some of the widely prevalent mistakes in spoken and written Tamil so that the Tamil scholars would join hands in correcting them
Grubh, who has Tamil as his mother tongue, says that, in spite of it being a phonetic language, Tamil has too many discrepancies in pronunciation, and goes on to identify the wrong pronunciation of vowels.
He believes that besides causing confusion in the minds of young learners, the discrepancies make it difficult for foreigners to study the language.
“English is not accessible even to Englishmen” and “…the English have no respect for their language” — George Bernard Shaw in the Preface to Pygmalion , a satire on English language. He says the phonetics varies from street to street in London.
Thousands of dialects exist in the world, and India has several hundreds. Linguists are of the view that the spoken form of the language, or tongue language, developed over a period of more than 5,000 years, and the written form evolved only about 3,000 years ago. The two forms cannot be synchronised fully.
Much of the confusion in pronunciation in Tamil relates to the letters zha-la , la-la, na-na, and ta-ra . In school, children are taught how to write the words correctly so as to convey the intended meaning rather than how to pronounce them. For example, azhagu is pronounced as alagu , which has no meaning. Words that have different meanings can cause confusion if they are not correctly pronounced.
Deficiency
In Grubh's view, the Tamil alphabet has a “deficiency” in not having some important phonemes and, as a consequence, the language's versatility is impaired and those who want to write and read this ‘phonetic' language correctly are “perplexed.”
He argues that the alphabet can be enriched by “re-popularising” the use of the Grantha letters ja, sha, sa, ha, ksha and shri to the extent required . “Why do we have to limit the versatility of Tamil by discouraging the use of … Grantha letters, which give so much more leverage to the language?”
Grubh goes on to suggest some remedial measures. Among them is the preparation of a new lexicon that has standard pronunciation keys for Tamil, incorporates the Grantha letters, and is free from the inherited pronunciation errors. He mentions the regional dialects existing in various districts in Tamil Nadu — Madurai, Tirunelveli, Chennai, Coimbatore, Thanjavur, Ramanathapuram, and Kanyakumari — and in Jaffna in Sri Lanka and points out the varying pronunciations in vogue in those regions.
Much of what Grubh has said, by way of diagnosis, about the ills afflicting Tamil language (in its spoken and written forms) — for example, wrong/corrupt pronunciation — is already known and not open to serious question. But quite a few of the remedies he has prescribed, especially those that involve drastic linguistic reforms, are evidently contentious and call for a consensus among the experts in the field before they could be implemented.
DISHEVELLING TAMIL: Robert B. Grubh; Divya Jothi Publications, 8/42, College Road, South Kundal, Kanyakumari – 629702. Rs. 120.
