NEW new project: Tamil

Now that I'm in Tamil Nadu, everyone here speaks Tamil. This language is quite different from Hindi and Telegu, because it is a Dravidian language. Unlike the previous Indian languages I studied, which are derived from Sanskrit, Telegu has very few consonant variations; that is, it only strictly has 20 consonants, and in the current day and age people have colloquially added 5 more borrowed from Sanksrit (these 5 extra consonants are also taught in school, so they are not solely used in colloquial speech). That all being said, different groups or castes of people pronounce Tamil in different ways - higher castes, according to my uncle, tend to speak with a more Sanskritized pronunciation, adding variations to the consonants where there would be none. I can only liken it to American English versus British English: they are the same language, but pronounced differently, and the varying pronunciations indicate where one comes from and where/how one learned the language (however, that may not be a good analogy, that is just what it seems to remind me of).

In terms of the script itself, Tamil seems to have "letters" that mostly look different from one another, or at least moreso than Hindi and Telugu (especially Telugu. It's quite difficult to tell those letters apart from each other). There are groups of consonants that look alike, such as ka, ca, and ta, but ka looks very different from pa, which looks very different from na (due to the spotty wifi here, I can't type in Tamil script, so refer to the picture below).

The Tamil "alphabet"

This difference in the overall look of consonants could be because Tamil is a very, very old language, of a similar age as Sanskrit, so over the years, the script itself has evolved quite a bit. 

A history of the Tamil script shown in an exhibit at Dakshin Chitra, here in Chennai

I've been searching for a "Teach Yourself Tamil!" book since I got to Chennai, but didn't find any of the type until today. So, when I found a section of dictionaries, I picked up an English-Hindi/Hindi-English dictionary, a Tamil-English dictionary, and a comic book about Ganesha in Tamil. I even found Harry Potter in Tamil!! That was definitely the most exciting find. (I also picked up a book which I mistakenly understood to be a Tamil-teaching book for English-speakers, but turned out to be the other way around. Now I'd really better learn Tamil, so that I can learn to speak English.)