English Keyboard to Tamil Phonetic Converter

Tamil script comprises 12 vowels (உயிர் எழுத்துக்கள்), 18 consonants (மெய் எழுத்துக்கள்), and 216 consonant-vowel combinations (உயிர்மெய் எழுத்துக்கள்), totaling 247 characters. Typing Tamil natively requires a specialized keyboard layout unfamiliar to most users trained on QWERTY. Incorrect transliteration produces garbled text that fails Unicode validation and renders as broken glyphs across devices. This tool implements a greedy longest-match phonetic mapping algorithm: you type English letter sequences (e.g., ka → க, thi → தி) and receive correct Tamil Unicode output in real time.

The mapping follows the widely-adopted Tamil phonetic convention used by Tamil99 and similar input systems, covering retroflex consonants (T, N, L in uppercase), aspirates, and all 12 vowel signs. Output is standard Unicode (range U+0B80 - U+0BFF), compatible with all modern browsers, operating systems, and databases. Note: this tool handles phonetic approximation. Loanwords from Sanskrit or English that have no native Tamil phoneme may require manual adjustment.

The transliteration engine uses a greedy longest-match algorithm over an input buffer B. At each keystroke, the algorithm attempts to match the longest prefix of B against the phonetic mapping dictionary D.

Where B is the current input buffer (sequence of English keystrokes not yet converted), D is the phonetic mapping dictionary containing all valid English-to-Tamil mappings, and n = len(B). The algorithm scans from the full buffer length down to 1, emitting the Tamil character for the first match found and moving the buffer cursor forward by the match length.

Tamil consonant-vowel combination is computed as: combined = consonant_base + vowel_sign, where the vowel sign (combining mark, உயிர் குறி) occupies Unicode codepoints U+0BBE through U+0BCC. A bare consonant with no following vowel receives the pulli (புள்ளி, U+0BCD) to indicate the inherent vowel is suppressed.