பக்கம்:ஆய்வுக் கோவை.pdf/284

Caste, the available medium before him is obviously the Tamil writing system. However present Tamil writing system is not fully equipped to handle this situation, since that has been used mainly for writing discourses in written Tamil. Hence authors are left to their own devices to overcome the difficulty of representing spoken forms in their texts. A careful study of these devices is expected to contribute to our understanding of the interrelation between spoken and written Tamil and also will throw light on ways by which the gulf between these two can be bridged at least on representation level. For the present analysis we collected the conversational texts (represented through Tamil graphemes) within inverted commas, from the works of same authors well known for their use of regional and social Tamil dialects in their works. As a sample test the following questions are raised. - (1) Does the writer symbolize phonemes only, or does he symbolize allophones also 2. Does the author ignore allophonic variations even when these can be easily represented with the help of native script 2. To answer this question a specific situation may be taken. scs and /s/ are phonemes in the Tamil dialect of Kanyakumari." In the writings of Sundararamaswamy (a well-known short-story writer in Tamil who freely makes use of Kanyakumari variety of Tamil) it is found that his writings keep these two phonemes apart on the script level by giving separate graphemic representation in this way : The Tamil character & is used to represent /c/ where as Grantha character Gro is used to represent /s/. Now, there are several dialects in Tamil in which we find: that the phones [c] and [s] occur only as allophones of a phoneme sc/. How does a writer represent this 2. If he uses 27 Ꮾ