Our treatment for pubewrphonia is based on uvula manipulation.
Tamil language uvula trills ; exlanation
Standard Spoken Tamil is not usually a written language.
Tamil language have five dialects.
1.Northern -Chennai, Kanchipuram, Tiruvannamalai and
Vellore Districts
2.Central – Tiruchirappalli, Thanjavur, Cuddalore and
Villupuram Districts
3.Central – Madurai Madurai
4.Southern- Ramanathapuram, Tirunelveli and Kanniyakumari
Districts
5.Western -Salem, Dharmapuri, Coimbatore and Nilgiris
Districts.
Phonologically, it seems clear to me that ழ் is to be grouped with r-sounds. Toḷkāppiyār gives
some very interesting phonotactic reasons for this, as he himself groups it with /r/, which we
have in sutra 95. In sutra 29 he says:
“yarala vennum puḷḷ i munnar
mutalā keluttu ṅ akaramoṭ u tōnrum.”
The tongue, curled back and the tip of the tongue, placed very near the roof of the mouth but not touching it. The airstream is allowed to pass through the sides of the tongue as well as in between the tip of the tongue and the roof of the mouth This sound may be described shortly as a voiced retroflex palatal
lateral.
By contrast, the specimen of Tamil given in the Principles of the International Phonetic
Association (IPA 1949:38-9), although labeled “Tirunelvalli, spoken language”, is almost
completely Literary Tamil, except for some items that are possibly the result of transcriptional
mistakes, or hypercorrections on the part of the informant. In any event, /r/ and /r/ in intervocalic
position are not phonetically distinguished in that sample even though only one instance of /r/,
i.e. ஏறவும் /eeravum/, transcribed there as [e:ravum].
Anatomists have attempted to explain the uvula for a long time. Galen (122-199 AD), one of the fathers of anatomy, believed that the uvula was important in speech and contributed to the beauty of the voice (Fritzell 1969). Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519 AD) wrote that, “The uvula is the drip-stone whence drips the humor which descends from above and which falls by way of the oesophagus into the stomach. It has no occasion to go by way of the trachea to the spiritual regions.” This is based on the belief at the time that excess fluid from the brain and pituitary gland drained into the nasal cavity (da Vinci 1983). While Galen believed that this fluid would drip onto the larynx to lubricate the voice and lungs, Leonardo took the opposite view, that the uvula directed this brain fluid away from the larynx and into the esophagus and on to the stomach, thus avoiding the lungs and the thoracic region where vital spirits resided.A traditional belief of the Bedouins of the southern Sinai Desert is that the uvula is the source of thirst, and its removal leads to less of a need or desire for water. More scientific ideas of uvular function concern its role in producing certain sounds in human speech, in directing mucus from the nasal passages toward the base of the tongue, in assisting with the immunological response of throat tissue, in protecting the openings to the Eustachian tubes, and in the sensation of temperature to prevent the swallowing of overly hot food (Back et al. 2004).
