Tamil phonetics and its short comings

 Ok AI can't do better than this. 

As it is, very few Tamilians speak chaste Tamil. 

Besides, unlike poetry l, in songs one can take liberties with pronunciation. To top it all Tamil has a few features.  

It is my mother tongue, I did my entire schooling in it ( though later on I did Sanskrit, Hindi ( of course), besides dabbling in a few other languages because basically I have intense interest in etymology and lexicography. 

Tamil as such is a language with irregular phonetics, as bad as English.

At least, in English, they accept linguistic, historical and etymological justifications and openly declare the irregularities as such because , like all European languages, they too need to express their pronunciation through IPA (INTERNATIONAL PHONETIC ALPHABET). 

But in Tamil, due to some reasons which are the result of long inculcated bias, Tamilians are  unwilling to accept those anomalies/ irregularities and adopt an indifferent attitude of 'let those who want to learn learn'.

That's why for anyone, especially non-native speakers, learning to speak in Tamil will be very tough. 

The difference between script and pronunciation are totally haywire. 

We write தவறு,தண்ணீர், தம்பி (thambi), தந்தை (thanthai), தப்பு (thappu) & தண்டனை all with the alphabet த. But pronounce last word as 'Dha'ndanai'.

In English too, we have those problems but they get buried or ignored because 80% of the speakers of English across the globe are non native speakers  (it is not their mother tongue) and hence,  there are too many varieties of English. 

Coming to irregularities of pronunciation. 

Let us start with the first Alphabet 'A' . It has a minimum of 3 pronunciations. 

1. As in mAn, cAt etc.

 2. As in April 

3. As in Above.

Similarly, even combinations are horrible when you write 'oo' . 

You say dOOr, flOOr but pOOr it is first, in fact  poor phonetics.