A chart of the

ollows:[94]
Labial
Plosives
?
?
Nasals m
?
?
Tap

Tamil consonant phonemes in the International Phonetic Alphabet f

Dental
p
?
n?
?

Central approximants
?
Lateral approximants
?

Alveolar
t?
t
?
?
n
?
?
?
?
?
?
?
?
l?
?

Retroflex
?
t??
?
?
?
?
?

Palatal
k

Velar

The plosives have voiced allophones in predictable contexts. The sounds /f/ and
/?/ are peripheral to the phonology of Tamil, being found only in loanwords and
frequently replaced by native sounds. There are well-defined rules for elision i
n Tamil categorised into classes based on the phoneme which undergoes elision.
Aytam
Classical Tamil also had a phoneme called the Aytam, written as ?'. Tamil grammar
ians of the time classified it as a dependent phoneme (or restricted phoneme[105
]) (carpe?uttu), but it is very rare in modern Tamil. The rules of pronunciation
given in the Tolkappiyam, a text on the grammar of Classical Tamil, suggest tha
t the aytam could have glottalised the sounds it was combined with. It has also
been suggested that the aytam was used to represent the voiced implosive (or clo
sing part or the first half) of geminated voiced plosives inside a word.[106] Th
e Aytam, in modern Tamil, is also used to convert p to f when writing English wo
rds using the Tamil script.
Numerals and symbols
Main article: Tamil numerals
Apart from the usual numerals, Tamil also has numerals for 10, 100 and 1000. Sym
bols for day, month, year, debit, credit, as above, rupee, and numeral are prese
nt as well. Tamil also uses several historical fractional signs.
zero
one
two
three four
five
six
seven eight nine
ten
hundred
thousand
?
?
?
?
?
?
?
?
?
?
?
?
?
day
month year
debit credit as above
rupee numeral
?
?
?
?
?
?
?
?