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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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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
- 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.
- 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...
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