Coming to consonants, we find the Tamil alphabet very defective, and in some cases redundant also. Surds coming after nasals lose their hard sounds as in தெங்கு, இஞ்சி, ஞண்டு, கந்துகம் and செம்பியன் ; and in Malayalam they are changed into nasals as in மாங்ஙா for மாங்காய், குஞ்ஞி for குஞ்சி, இருந்நு for இருந்து and so on. Sometimes க and ச even when not preceded by nasals get the soft sound similar to the Arabic ghayn and the Sanskrit (
Indic characters) as in செகுத்த and பசித்த respectively. Thus for the thirty-one letters we have fifteen vowel and twenty-five consonant sounds, or forty in all. This is certainly a defect. But some might say that when the alphabet was first introduced, the Tamil language had only thirty-one sounds, and that the remaining nine explained above crept in during later times owing to the influence of the Indo-Aryans. This may be accepted as partly correct, as we find to this day, if one is careful enough to observe, slight variations in the pronunciation of the Jaffna Tamils and the Tamil Brahmans.
The letters peculiar to Tamil are ஃ, ழ, ற and ன. The sound of ஃ is midway between the Arabic ghayn and the Sanskrit ஹ. It is found in no other Indian or European languages, and it seems to suggest some connection of the Tamil race with the Semitic or Western Asiatic nations. The letter ழ is equally a private property of Tamil and a terrible bugbear for Europeans to pronounce. It has been variously transliterated in some of the European languages by lj, zj, zh, rl, l, zy, &c.; Dr. Pope's rule
