* சிந்தனைக் கட்டுரைகள்
17 the first letter which is hard consonant. This is exact way in which all children, I have observed, pronounce such words not according to English fashion but according to Tamil. Similarly in the middle of the word 'irksome', the sounds ‘r' and ‘k' and ‘k' and 's' do not coalesee easily with one another, unless it is changed into 'irikkusome' according to the Tamil phonetic law by which the act of pronouncing it is rendered easier for all including children. In the same way, the word ‘nut' must be pronounced ‘nuttu' in Tamil; the reason is simply this: the breath started by one's exertion to utter it does not stop abruptly at the letter 't' but runs a little onward and ends in a vowel sound ‘u'. It its this and such other phonetic laws tending to an effortless utterance of words that has preserved Tamil in all its youthful glory all through the indefinite period of its life. Even the principle of laziness which is actively at work in killing one language and creating many, - these to be killed again to make room for others to be produced anew had not been able to touch Tamil, in as much as its words lend themselves to be pronounced easily by all. It is this flexible quality combined with the influence of a permanent civilisation that has made Tamil survive all the once most cultivated language of the ancient world. Even to-day the language of a purely literary Tamil piece, of course not encum- bered with old and antiquated grammatical peculiarities, is not dif- ferent from that spoken by the peasantry. The Tamil words that are more than seven thousand years old, have not undergone any change in the mouths of the later. The sacred Kural written two thousand years ago is intelligible even now to an illiterate rustic. Does not this indicate the great vitality of Tamil?
It was shown above that the sibilants s, sh, and c and the aspirate h are entirely absent from Tamil. These three hissing sounds and the aspirate not only do waste the breath and energy of the speaker but also produce a jarring and unpleasant sound on the ears of those who hear them. That is why all great English poets as Milton, Wordsworth, Shelley, Tennyson and others studiously es- chew from their poems the use of words having hissing sounds, lest such words should mar the melody of their songs. In pointing out this characteristic beauty in Tennyson, the modern critic Mr.
