Phonetic and Phonological Description of Sounds

Phonetic and Phonological Description of Sounds

Introduction

Tamil is the name given to a Dravidian language which is predominantly spoken by Tamil people of North-east Sri Lanka and South India. The official status of Tamil exists in the Indian states of Tamil Nadu, Nicobar Islands and Andaman. Tamil is also considered as an official language of Mauritius and Singapore and a national language of Sri Lanka. It is also spoken as a second language in the states of Nicobar Islands, Andaman, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Kerala. It is among those 22 scheduled languages of India which was declared as a classical language by Indian government in 2004. There are also significant minorities who speak Tamil in Mauritius, Netherlands, Reunion, United States, Germany, Fiji, South Africa, Canada and Malaysia as well as emigrant communities all around the world. Tamil people face difficulties in speaking English language (Elinor, 2004).

Discussion

In order to understand the difficulties and the differences in speaking English by Tamil, the constants and vowels constituents of word phonology are focused. The charts below represents the two English consonants and two English vowels and their pronunciation difference when it is spoken by any Tamil person (Revell, 2011).

Two English Consonants

English Consonants

Pronunciation By Tamil Speaker

P

'F'- Tamil speaker faces difficulties in pronunciating 'P' . Instead of making sound of 'P' he sounds it like 'F'.

Z

'J'- Tamil speaker faces difficulties in pronunciating 'Z'. Instead of making sound of 'Z', he makes sound of 'J'.

Two English Vowels

English Vowels

Pronunciation By Tamil Speaker

O

'Awww'

U

'Yooo'

The primary cause of such a mix-up is because Tamil language does not have the letter P and letter Z. Hence, the letter P is substituted with the letter F and letter Z is substituted with letter J. Tamil speakers may change or adapt to new words if similar words were a part of their native language and dialect but it can be observed that because 'P and 'Z'' are not a part of the their language, so they have difficulty using it in regular uninterrupted speech.

Tamil people found it difficult to pronounce O and U because these vowels are not included in their language as well. So they are unable to pronounce these vowels with their actual pronunciation.

Phonetic Alphabets Describing the Sound

Answer (a)

The two English consonants are Word phonology refers to the set of systems of phonemes and syllabic structures that constitutes the fundamentals of the spoken form of words in a specific language (Kelly, 2000).

In English, base form of words i.e. mono-morphemic items such as crocodile, river, boat but not reptilian, riverside and boating mostly possess three syllables maximum. There are some mono-morphemic items that have four syllables e.g. hullabaloo, catamaran, and caterpillar, phonemic systems of weak and strong vowels, a prosodic system of degrees of word stress and of consonants in specific phonotactic arrangements (Revell, 2011). All the systems and structures are embraced by word phonology that is allowed in word formation that is characteristics of four particular languages. So it can be said that the word phonology of ...