A little more than a year ago, I decided to learn how to read Tamil. I have now memorised the Tamil alphabet in Tamil alphabetical order. They're the letters ka nga cha/sa nya, da Na ta na, pa ma ya ra la va, ḻa La Ra na, and the Grantha letters ja, Srii, sha, Sa, ha, ksha.
Grantha letters are not considered part of the original Tamil alphabet and some writers try to avoid using them. But they're essential for spelling loanwords from other languages, people's names and place names. If a word contains a Grantha letter, it's a sure indicator that it's not a native Tamil word.
Learning Tamil helps build the understanding of how Indic scripts work. Every consonant letter carries an inherent vowel sound, which is "a". Vowels can appear after, before, or around the consonant letter. Vowels have their own independent symbols when written as standalone letters. To silence the inherent consonant, a "puLLi" (dot) is written above the consonant letter.
After comparing the Tamil writing system to other Indic scripts such as Devanagari, Malayalam, Gurmukhi, Thai, Tibetan, Burmese and Cambodian, I can say that Tamil is the most simple of them all. There are far fewer complex conjunct consonant glyphs. Tamil has the least number of letters. Tamil doesn't have different letters to indicate aspirated and unaspirated consonants. Instead, Tamil relies on grammar rules to differentiate them.
Knowing how to read Tamil doesn't mean that I can speak Tamil. It's just like someone with zero knowledge of English who studied the Roman alphabet from A to Z and can now read English but doesn't know the meaning of the words. Vocabulary acquisition is a totally different story, and it's often a long, long journey.
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