Tamil Liquids Revisited

[Radhakrishna Warrier]

Just happened to read Prof. Harold Schiffman’s paper “The Tamil Liquids, Revisited”.

I think he is spot on that modern spoken Tamil has lost the distinction between ர (the “soft” r) and ற (the “hard” r) as also between ல (alveolar l) and ள (retroflex l); and that ழ (zha) has merged with ள (retroflex l).  To me, it appears that most native speakers of Tamil get the correct pronunciation of ள only when they try to pronounces ழ.  🙂 At other times they have a tough time distinguishing ல and ள.  Similarly, the distinction between dental ந (n) and alveolar ன (ṉ) has practically disappeared.  நான் (naaṉ, I) is pronounced as னான் (ṉaaṉ), the tandoori bread that we eat in Indian restaurants.   The distinction between retroflex ண and alveolar ன has also blurred to the extent they have to call the former 3-chuzhi (curl) na and the latter 2-chuzhi (curl) na.  

When I was young, I used to wonder about these peculiarities of native Tamil pronunciation because even a Malayali child pronounces all these sounds quite distinctly and effortlessly.  But now I know better. It is the nature of languages - a sound that is quite easy for speakers of one language can be an insurmountable phonetic mountain for speakers of another language. 

I think that in native Tamil pronunciation, ள moved towards ல and both are now pronounced somewhat like the English "dark" l in names like Jill or Neil. 

In Malayalam, the letter ഴ (ழ) is pronounced very similar to American English 'r'.  When my friend Kory pronounces his first name, I hear it almost like കോഴി (கோழி, kozhi) meaning hen or cock.  And this is the standard literary pronunciation of ழ in Tamil too although if the Tamil speaker is not careful, he or she will slip into ள.

I think in ancient times, ன்ற was pronounced as ṉḏ (alveolar ‘n’ + alveolar ‘d’) and not as ṉḏṟ as in modern literary Tamil.   I think ṟ is closely related to the alveolar ṯ and ḏ.  In Malayalam, vayaṟŭ is stomach, but to say "in the stomach" we say "vayaṯṯil" with the geminate alveolar ṯ.  In writing, the geminate ṯ is represented by a geminate ṟ.

I wonder at what point of time did Tamil lose all these distinctions that are still strongly maintained in Malayalam.  Perhaps in the days of Tolkappiyar, even a child could effortlessly pronounce all these.  Somewhere in the flow of time these distinctions got lost, so much so that even a native Tamil holding a post graduate degree in his/her mother tongue has to spend a lot of effort to pronounce these correctly (and still might not succeed).  At what point of time were correct pronunciations lost?  Say, during the Pallava times, would a Tamil child have been able to pronounce these sounds correctly?  

Regards,

Radhakrishna Warrier

[Satish Kumar Dogra]

I think the distinctions have disappeared after the advent of the Tv channels and the Internet. Up until the beginning of this century, most educated people pronounced these sounds correctly. All India Radio and Doordarshan insisted on correct pronunciation. Newspapers and magazines would not publish writings that had errors. Then came the private channels, the youtube channels and the thousands of blogs. Here no rules applied. 

Now, everyone pronounces விழா as விலா and பழம் as பலம்.

Dogra (Chennai)

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[Balasubramanian Ramakrishnan]

There are multiple factors at play here. There are large numbers of Telugu speakers in influential cities like Madras-Chennai who cannot get the zha. It is popular and was even in my days among young people and TV anchors to pretend that they can’t pronounce correctly. Ra and ra, na and n_a are different cases. Retroflex na and dental na are correctly pronounced by most Tamils. So are retroflex La and dental la. After all paLLi and palli cannot be the same. 

Ramakrishnan 

[विश्वासो वासुकेयः]

This reminds me of ShrI Madhav DeshpANDe's https://www.academia.edu/1306422/Genesis_of_Rgvedic_retroflexion_a_historical_and_sociolinguistic_investigation .

I am curious to know how our understanding of the dravidian phonemes referred to in the paper have changed.