Re: Tamil language
- From: JohnM <john@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 1 May 2007 18:58:08 +0100
In article <1177995182.561232.228380@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
muthuu@xxxxxx <muthuu@xxxxxx> writes
English alphabet cannot write certain names and words in other
languages. Does it make English a useless language. No. It uses what
it has to spell foreign words. That is what Tamil does too.
Please, please I didn't say that Tamil is useless. What I wrote is "As a
result, spoken Tamil and written Tamil have been diverging for
centuries, and the older, ancient version is of no use for any English
loanwords, like hamburger or computer or software, because it can't
express them in written form."
"no use" is most definitely not useless :-)
For example, English cannot spell correctly the word "Tamil". "l" is
an approximation for a certain Tamil letter.
Ok, use English as an example. Is "Tamil" close enough? What would be
more correct?
Now, as you correctly point out, the alphabet of many languages only
approximates the alphabet of others. English-Arabic is another example,
which is there are many ways of spelling Gaddafy, Qaddafy, Khadhafi,
even the Koran (Q'uran) etc. Japanese also uses a syllabary and ma-i-ku-
ro-so-fu-tu is how Microsoft is pronounced and correspondingly written
in Katagana.
But I am told that that the Tamil script can not write loan wards at all
- not even approaching them phonetically like Japanese does with English
or English does with Arabic. That sounds very peculiar and this is why I
am asking (and temporarily jumping into this newsgroup).
--
JohnM
.
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