When Beschi wrote his “Kodun Tamil”, he knew that, “To learn the power of the letters of any language from a written body of rules is a long and difficult way of doing it: but it is an easy and short one to hear them from the mouth of a teacher, and to repeat them after him, though it be in a stammering manner.” By “power of the letters”, he meant pronunciation and it is obvious that Beschi understood that repeating them after hearing the word or letter was the best form. While writing his book to aid other and new missionaries to learn the language, he must have nevertheless felt that to write about the way to pronounce letters was inferior to the method of learning them directly from the native. The initial difficulty in pronouncing the letters is clearly expressed in his “stammering”. Beschi, one need not say, was a great observer.

While discussing the pronunciation of Tamil letters, words, etc., Beschi says, “a certain person requested that I would add something about the sound by which the Tamulians distinguish long from short syllables, for as much as it is peculiar and difficult to foreigners.”² He later adds, “But on the subject of sound, it is difficult to write as it is easy to speak.”³ Because it was, “peculiar” (something which was not found in their own language and with which they were not acquainted made) it was inevitably “difficult”. What was difficult to the foreigner was done with ease by the native i.e., they “well express the long and the short ones in every word even though it may consist of four or five or six syllables.⁴ In this context, Beschi points out “four letters, which differ considerably from ours and are not easily pronounced by foreigners.”⁵

The pronunciation of these four letters ṭa, ṇa, ḷa, l̠a have always worried the foreigner.

“The Tamulians in the course of speaking often add letters which it is highly expedient to know, not only for the perfection

2. Beschi, Kodun Tamil; Rule 5.

3. Ibid. Rule 5.

4. Ibid. Rule 6.

5. Ibid. Rule 4.