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Tamil: Languages
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Similar to other Dravidian languages, Tamil is an agglutinative language. Tamil is characterised by its use of retroflex consonants, like the other Dravidian languages. It ... uses a liquid l (ழ) (example Tami
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English is the common language that binds the various ethic groups together - while Mandarin, Malay and Tamil are ... national languages. All children are taught English, and have to also master their mother tongue in schools.
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Tamil belongs to the southern branch of the Dravidian languages. It is sometimes classified as being part of a Tamil language family, which alongside Tamil proper... includes the languages of about 35 ethno-linguistic groups such as the Irula, and Yerukula languages (see SIL Ethnologue). This group is a subgroup of the Tamil-Malayalam languages, which falls under a subgroup of the Tamil-Kodagu languages, which in turn is a subgroup of the Tamil-Kannada languages. The closest major relative of Tamil is Malayalam which is explained by the fact that until about the ninth century, Tamil and Malayalam were dialects of one language, called "Tamil" by the speakers of both. Although many of the differences between Tamil and Malayalam evidence a pre-historic split between eastern and western dialects, the process of separation of the two into distinct languages was not completed until sometime in the 13th or 14th century.
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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.
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There are 13 vowels and 24 consonants in the Tamil alphabet. In words, though, these consonants and vowels can stand alone as well as be combined, for a total of 349 different letters. Many of the sounds in the Tamil language are difficult for native English speakers to hear and speak, especially the retroflex letters. Learning to differentiate among these sounds can be practiced in this curriculum.
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You can enter in Tamil into the text boxes of Yahoo mail and Hotmail as well. The most important thing to do is to make sure that you have the Internet options set with Thenee UNIX font and Tamil language selected. If you don’t do it right then things won’t be right.
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