Malayalam Alphabets [ÎÜÏÞ{¢ ¥føÎÞÜ] continued...

Malayalam is read as it is written. It is a phonetic language. Letters are round and well-defined. Vowels and consonants are mixed to form words. There are some simple rules to be noted and observed.

1. Vowels in their original form appear only at the beginning of a word. For example, the letter ¥ can appear at the beginning of a word, but never in between two letters in a word.
2. Each vowel has a corresponding vowel sign, which can be used within a word. Very often this vowel sign gets attached to the vowel. Though in the modern Malayalam, to facilitate typewriters etc, these signs do appear more or less standalone within the words. Most newspapers today use the modern Malayalam.
3. There is no special sign for ¥, each consonant as written already includes the ¥ sound within it! Strictly speaking, the first consonant µ is equivalent to µí + ¥ = µ
4. Vowel Signs corresponding to each vowel are as follows:

   ¥	¦	§	¨	©	ª	«
   	Þ	ß	à	á	â	ã
   ®	¯	æ®	²	³	´	¥¢	¥£
   æ	ç	ææ	æµÞ	çµÞ	ì	¢	£

   Note that vowel signs for letters ² and ³ consists of two signs, and each of them appear on either side of the consonant. We have therefore used µ as an example in the above table.

5. Some of the letters (both vowels and consonants) are very seldom used at the beginning of a word. For example, there are very few words starting in « and practically none in ¥¢ and ¥£. Among consonants there are very few words starting with ¹, À, Á, Â, Ã, Å, Ë, {, ×

    . . . to be continued...