A guide to pronunciations

There are a lot of Tamil and Sanskrit words used in the story, mostly for character and place names, and a few more for conversational phrases. Here’s a set of general guidelines to pronounce them—

a as in bat

ā as in mark, palm

e as in let

ē as in clay, survey

i as in fit

ī as in meet

o as in soft

ō as in flow, dough

u as in put

ū as in fool, gloom

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Some names require retroflex consonants—Semmalvarāyan uses it, while Senthālan does not.

Ideally, these are marked with an underdot called a nukta—“Semmaḷvarāyan” is the correct spelling.

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• The š is the post-alveolar s, which is in between a soft s as in sun, and the harder s as in shade. 

Author’s note: The above two points require special fonts with multi-lingual diacritic support, so I haven’t used it so far. Once I find a replacement, I’ll edit it here on Substack as well.

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Some words, when joined, have an central double syllable—when ūsi (needle) is combined with padai (army) to form ūsippadai, which translates to “needle corp”, to denote a special forces regiment, the central “p” doubles up, and is pronounced as ūsip + padai. In speech, its spoken fast and is almost indiscernible.

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The final consonant of the first name is usually dropped when the full name is used. For example, Aranvēndhan becomes Aranvēndha Thattān, and Kumudhan becomes Kumudha Thattān.

The same rule applies in informal speech, and the final vowel is usually elongated. Like so—

“Aranvēndhā!” Mārthāndan called.
“Mārthāndā!” Aranvēndhan called.