Telugu Literature - Alphabets

Alphabets

All the Telugu alphabets (known as AKSHARAMALA) are carved out of a circle.. There are 56 Telugu letters that are currently in use.

Literary Telugu has complete set of letters which follows scientific system to express sounds. It is highly conducive for Phonetics. It has more letters than any Indian language. Some of them are introduced to express fine shades of difference in sounds.

Telugu has full-Zero or anusvāra( ం ), half-zero or arthanusvāra or Chandrabindu (ఁ) and Visarga to convey various shades of nasal sounds. la and La, ra and Ra are differentiated.

Avagraha (ఽ) is is used for extra length with long vowels.

Telugu has CH and JH which are not represented in Sanskrit, and S, SH, and KSH which are not found in Tamil. But some complicated words are borrowed by Sanskrit. But the common language closely resembles with Tamil, with slight modification.

Telugu script can reproduce the full range of Sanskrit phonetics without losing any of the text's originality. Telugu has made its letters expressive of all the sounds and hence it has to deal with significant borrowings from Sanskrit, and Hindustani.