Malayalam for tamil speakers and readers

[vasanthakokilam]

As a Tamil speaker and reader, I find that I can understand 60% of spoken Malayalam ( say, in movies ) if I pay close attention.
While I look at the Malayalam script, though the letters look different at the surface from the Tamil script, there is some commonality but the strike rate there is lower.
But I never bothered to seriously look into how similar they are. Until today. On a whim I looked up at Wikipedia for both Tamil and
Malayalam and they have the phoneme chart for both of them.
(This was triggered while watching that Malayalam train movie on youtube that S-P referred to in the Coffee thread.)

I thought I will post the two tables here since it is useful to have a side by side comparison. I am going to use this to see if I can make rapid progress in learning to read Malayalam.
Basically, to leverage knowledge of one to quickly learn the other. Not for any specific purpose.. Those who know both Malayalam and Tamil script
can advise me on if this is a quick and useful way for learning the script of the other language.

Also, if you can list which letters look close and how to easily get from one to the other would be useful ( some are close but not exact,
so some rules like ' turn it side ways', 'contort it a bit here' etc. is what I have in mind ). Of course, there are a lot more consonant symbols in
Malayalam than Tamil, we can not do anything about that except to learn them.

What I have observed so far is, in vowels there is a reasonably good match.
Interestingly, the first two letters of the alphabet, the 'a' and 'A' ( long 'a' ) look so complicated in Malayalam. The teachers and parents probably have one heck of a challenge teaching kids to write that first letter?
It is much like how the 'e' ( short 'e' ) is complicated in Tamil with idiyappam like overlapping curves!

And in consonants there are some close matches as well, though the exact symbols of Tamil M, Ya, Va stand for tha, dha and Kha in Malayalam
( though a variation and transformed version of the tamil symbol still works for the corresponding ones in Malayalam ).

One exercise we can use is, those who know both Malayalam and Tamil script, can write some words in Malayalam that a Tamil reader can get it without actually looking at the chart. Then we can go in to introducing a few letters that are drastically different. I think it will be fun. The two languages are so simialar that we can leverage the knowledge of one to learn the other.

Here are the two tables. The first one is for vowels and the second one is for consonants. Left is Tamil, right is Malayalam.

Vowels:



Consonants:

[mahakavi]

>>It is much like how the 'e' ( short 'e' ) is complicated in Tamil with idiyappam like overlapping curves! <<
vk:
I think you mean to say the short "i" rather than short "e". Only the short "i" looks like a spaghetti swirl (iDiyAppam in your parlance). The short "e" is much simpler.

[vasanthakokilam]

mk, I meant the letter Short Close-Front in the vowel table above.

[mankuthimma]

Reminded of the days when my Kid sister would point at boards / nameplates in Malayalam and exult :" Jilebeeeeeeee"

[srkris]

VK, the Malayalam vowel and consonant charts appear inaccurate, where are ai and au in the vowels?

You may see the omniglot website for the script

The Malayalam script looks closer to Grantha than the modern Tamil script, though Grantha is the common ancestor of both these scripts. Even tulu was written in a variant of the grantha script until colonial times and looked close to malayalam. However, these days it is written in the Kannada script. Kannada and telugu scripts are derived from the Kadamba script. Kadamba and grantha are themselves derived from Brahmi.

It may be an interesting exercise to create a unified common script for all major indian languages which would contain both common sounds as well as unique sounds of the languages.

In my experience the biggest barrier to learning a new language is the script. If we have a common script learning a language becomes significantly easier. This is why it is much easier for a Gujarati speaker to learn Marathi than it is for a kannadiga or a Telugu speaker to learn Tamil or Malayalam (and vice versa)

[vasanthakokilam]

Srkris: I copied that from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malayalam I take it then that it is incomplete

It says "Malayalam has also borrowed the Sanskrit diphthongs of /äu/ (represented in Malayalam as ഔ, au) and /ai/ (represented in Malayalam as ഐ, ai), although these mostly occur only in Sanskrit loanwords. "

Is that true?

(Malayalam au looks close to Tamil au. )

In any case, thanks for the background on the scripts. That explains the similarity. My objective here is to see if one can learn the malayalam script quickly by leveraging the knowledge of the tamil script. Basically list the ones that are very similar and close and call it done and then learn the delta from scratch which is hopefully a small set.

[srkris]

I presume that neither malayalam nor Tamil might have had ai and au originally (when they were the same language). It appears that these did not exist in any dravidian language; I don't find a lot of words that contain them. Even where these are found, they are often realized as 'a', for ex. ainthu and auvai are pronounced anchu and avvai. Grammarians tend to classify nonexistent sounds for systematic purposes, i guess you know the sanskrit lu vowel that is found only in one word. Of course I may be wrong abt the non existence of ai and au in proto-Tamil.

In my experience it is best to memorize the script from scratch and find similarities only in the spoken language. That is the fastest way to learn any language

[srkris]

It is possible to make a lossless transliteration of Tamil words in Malayalam script hence I would suggest anyone trying to learn Malayalam script to begin by writing Tamil sentences in Malayalam. You wouldn't need to master the entire script for this since you won't use the aspirated sounds, but take care to use the voiced stops as they occur in speech - for example paTittAn should be written literally as paDittAn in Malayalam, not as in Tamil.

[vasanthakokilam]

Your last suggestion sounds good, to get started. My goal is not necessarily to to get to the level of reading books in Malayalam but for more casual purposes like to read quickly road signs and markers, and may be the credits in Malayalam movies or the written Malayalam that flashes by in Malayalam TV channels.

Yes, you are right about learning another languages through similarities. If I only casually listen, Malayalam sounds incomprehensible because the surface level differences and accent differences dominate the perception. But if I pay a bit closer attention, then all of a sudden a lot of words start to make sense due to the similarity with Tamil and those that don't can inferred from the context.