Of languages and limitations

Ever since Junior started learning tamil in school, it has been a tough time and home. While consciously or otherwise, we are particular in knowing the right spelling and at times even the pronunciation of the English language, tamil being the mother tongue is taken for granted. And worse of the list being, the way it is being taught in school. During his first standard, his tamil teacher did her absolute best in ensuring the essence of the language was destroyed in its bud and the language was introduced more as a fractal symbol and shape rather than actual alphabets. The immediate challenge for us at that time was to unlearn the way in which we were writing the Uyir and Mei ezhuthukkal and adapt to how it was being taught, which was actually the correct way of writing those alphabets. When they moved on to words the challenge became multifold with pronunciations coming into the picture. Tamil, a language that is so close to my heart that it pains to type this sentence, for want of better word, has a limited set of characters. It probably was the front runner in using multi tasking and multi threading as a concept, where in same letter will have different sound basis the context and word formation in play. The letter “Ta” is a classic example where it is used to represent not just the “Ta” sound but also the “Da” sound. It may be a tad too early but at a formative stage, we are very particular in junior understanding the difference in pronouncing “la” and “La”. Even though there are script wise representation for certain letters like “ha”, “sa” as those that are borrowed from Sanskrit and other languages, they are never really taught in schools as such, till at least couple of years into the language. When in Bangalore, I used to tease fellow Andhra and Kannadiga folks that their scripts resemble jaangiri or jelabi. They used to give it back saying tamil letters resemble noodles on chopsticks. I actually verified this and found it to be reasonably correct. One guy even used to tease us saying we will never be able to laugh in tamil for the word “ha” is not there in the script itself!!! At best we can only laugh “ga ga ga” and never “ha ha ha” without using the borrowed letters!! Again, I did try to recollect from whatever little tamil books that I’ve read as to how they’ve represented laughter. The closest I can remember being “gala gala vena sirithaal” or “goll endru sirithal” or “idi yena sirithaan”. Never in any other way that I could recollect. Possibly those authors having been handicapped by this and not wanting to “pollute” their writing by using other scripts, might’ve represented the laughter in this manner? Coming back to Junior and his tamil, at present he speaks tamil in mazhalai and even for some regular words he mixes them up which sound cute. After a point of time, considering him, he may start questioning on these lines and hopefully his tamil teacher then should’ve some acceptable answer!!