268 



Substitution of the Roman [No. 8, new sekies. 



Note. — It is desirable to make an observation or two here with 

 respect to the application of the Roman letters to Tamil. The Tamil 

 wholly rejects the aspirated consonants of the Sanskrit, together 

 with the separate aspirate h; it rejects Anusivdra, and in the clas- 

 sical dialect it ignores s, sh and 5; but the chief peculiarity of its 

 system is, that it rejects all the sonant or soft consonants of the 

 Sanskrit and the other alphabets, and uses only the hard conso- 

 nants or surds. Acting on this principle it rejects g,j, d, dan&b. 

 These letters, therefore, will not be required in the Tamil country, 

 except in words belonging to Sanskrit or to any foreign language 

 which are quoted as foreign. 



Whilst the Tamil rejects the characters referred to, it does not 

 reject the sounds which they denote, k is pronounced as g when 

 it occurs singly in the middle of a word or after a nasal, as k at 

 the beginning of a word and when doubled, and a similar rule ap- 

 plies to the other letters. 



As this peculiar arrangement is not an arbitrary one, but one 

 which springs from a law of sound that is characteristic of the lan- 

 guage, it cannot safely be set aside on the introduction of the Ro- 

 man character. For some time, at least, each Tamil consonant 

 must be transliterated exactly as it stands, irrespective of the sound 

 it receives. Whenever the Tamil k occurs, it must be transliterat- 

 ed by the Roman k f and it must be left to the Tamil ear, as it may 

 safely be left, to pronounce it soft, as g or gh, where it is so requir. 

 ed. If this rule is not attended to, the popularisation amongst the 

 Natives of the use of the Roman character will be seriously impeded. 



For similar reasons, wherever the Tamil uses certain characters 

 as the symbols of peculiar compound sounds, the exact equivalents 

 of those characters should be used in transliteration, and no attempt 

 should be made to produce the same result by means of any Eng- 

 lish combinations of letters. Thus, as the Tamil uses n and the 

 harsh lingual r as the symbol of the sound ndr, and double r as the 

 symbol of a sound resembling ttr, we must be content with imitat- 

 ing the Tamil in this and transliterating those letters just as they 

 stand. It will simply be necessary to explain to learners, as hither- 

 to, how those combinations are to be pronounced. 



