Tamil language

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Tamil
தமிழ் tamiḻ
Word Tamil.svg
Pronunciation [t̪ɐmɨɻ]
Native to India
Sri Lanka
Ethnicity Tamil people
Native speakers
 70 million (2007)[1]
8 million L2 speakers in India (no date)[2]
Early forms
Tamil alphabet (Brahmic)
Arwi Script (Abjad)
Tamil Braille (Bharati)
Vatteluttu (historical)
Signed Tamil
Official status
Official language in
 Sri Lanka,[3]
Singapore.[4]
Indian states: Tamil Nadu,[5] and Puducherry[6]
Recognised minority
language in
Language codes
ISO 639-1 ta
ISO 639-2 tam
ISO 639-3 Variously:
tam – Modern Tamil
oty – Old Tamil
ptq – Pattapu Bhasha
Linguist list
 oty Old Tamil
Glottolog tami1289  (Modern Tamil)[7]
oldt1248  (Old Tamil)[8]
Idioma tamil.png
This article contains IPA phonetic symbols. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Unicode characters.

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Tamil /ˈtæmɪl/ (தமிழ், tamiḻ, [t̪ɐmɨɻ] ?) is a Dravidian language predominantly spoken by the Tamil people of India and northern Sri Lanka, and also by the Tamil diaspora. Tamil is an official language of two countries, Singapore and Sri Lanka,[9][10] and has official status in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu and the Indian Union Territory of Puducherry. It is also used as one of the languages of education in Malaysia, along with English, Malay and Mandarin.[11][12] In India, outside of Tamil Nadu and Puducherry, Tamil is also spoken in the states of Kerala, Puducherry and Andaman and Nicobar Islands as a secondary language and by minorities in Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh. It is one of the 22 scheduled languages of India and was the first Indian language declared as a classical language, which was done by the Government of India in 2004.[13] The language is also spoken by Tamil minorities in Malaysia, the United Arab Emirates,[14] the United Kingdom, Mauritius, Canada,[15] South Africa,[16] Fiji,[17] Germany,[18] the Philippines, the United States, the Netherlands, Indonesia[19] and France, as well as smaller emigrant communities elsewhere.

Tamil is one of the longest surviving classical languages in the world.[20][21] Tamil-Brahmi inscriptions from 500 BC have been found on Adichanallur[22] and 2,200-year-old Tamil-Brahmi inscriptions have been found on Samanamalai.[23] It has been described as "the only language of contemporary India which is recognizably continuous with a classical past."[24] The variety and quality of classical Tamil literature has led to it being described as "one of the great classical traditions and literatures of the world".[25] Tamil literature has existed for over 2000 years.[26] The earliest period of Tamil literature, Sangam literature, is dated from ca. 300 BC – AD 300.[27][28] It has the oldest extant literature among other Dravidian languages.[20] The earliest epigraphic records found on rock edicts and hero stones date from around the 3rd century BC.[29][30] More than 55% of the epigraphical inscriptions (about 55,000) found by the Archaeological Survey of India are in the Tamil language.[31] Tamil language inscriptions written in Brahmi script have been discovered in Sri Lanka, and on trade goods in Thailand and Egypt.[32][33] The two earliest manuscripts from India,[34][35] acknowledged and registered by UNESCO Memory of the World register in 1997 and 2005, were in Tamil.[36]

In 1578, Portuguese Christian Missionaries published a Tamil prayer book in old Tamil script named 'Thambiraan Vanakkam', thus making Tamil the first Indian language to be printed and published.[37] Tamil Lexicon, published by the University of Madras, is the first among the dictionaries published in any Indian language.[38] Tamil is used as a sacred language of Ayyavazhi and in Tamil Hindu traditions of Shaivism and Vaishnavism. According to a 2001 survey, there were 1,863 newspapers published in Tamil, of which 353 were dailies.[39]

Classification

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Main article: Dravidian languages

Tamil belongs to the southern branch of the Dravidian languages, a family of around 26 languages native to the Indian subcontinent.[40] It is also classified as being part of a Tamil language family, which alongside Tamil proper, also includes the languages of about 35 ethno-linguistic groups[41] such as the Irula and Yerukula languages (see SIL Ethnologue).

The closest major relative of Tamil is Malayalam; the two began diverging around the 9th century AD.[42] Although many of the differences between Tamil and Malayalam demonstrate a pre-historic split of the western dialect,[43] the process of separation into a distinct language, Malayalam, was not completed until sometime in the 13th or 14th century.[44]

History

Silver coin of king Vashishtiputra Sātakarni (c. AD 160). Obv: Bust of king; Rev: Ujjain/Sātavāhana symbol, crescented six-arch chaitya hill and river with Tamil Brahmi script[45][46][47][48]

According to linguists like Bhadriraju Krishnamurti, Tamil, as a Dravidian language, descends from Proto-Dravidian, a Proto-language. Linguistic reconstruction suggests that Proto-Dravidian was spoken around the third millennium BC, possibly in the region around the lower Godavari river basin in peninsular India. The material evidence suggests that the speakers of Proto-Dravidian were of the culture associated with the Neolithic complexes of South India.[49] The next phase in the reconstructed proto-history of Tamil is Proto-South Dravidian. The linguistic evidence suggests that Proto-South Dravidian was spoken around the middle of the second millennium BC, and that proto-Tamil emerged around the 3rd century BC. The earliest epigraphic attestations of Tamil are generally taken to have been written shortly thereafter.[50] Among Indian languages, Tamil has the most ancient non-Sanskritised Indian literature.[51] Scholars categorise the attested history of the language into three periods, Old Tamil (300 BC – AD 700), Middle Tamil (700–1600) and Modern Tamil (1600–present).[52] In November 2007, an excavation at Quseir-al-Qadim revealed Egyptian pottery dating back to first century BC with ancient Tamil Brahmi inscriptions.[32] John Guy states that Tamil was the lingua franca for early maritime traders from India.[53]

Legend

According to Hindu legend, Tamil or in personification form Tamil Thāi (Mother Tamil) was created by Lord Shiva. Murugan, revered as the Tamil God, along with sage Agastya, brought it to the people.[54]

Etymology

Agastya, Chairman of first Tamil Sangam, Madurai, Pandiya Kingdom

The earliest extant Tamil literary works and their commentaries celebrates the Pandiyan Kings for the organization of long-termed Tamil Sangams, which researched, developed and made amendments in Tamil language. Even though the name of the language which was developed by these Tamil Sangams is mentioned as Tamil, the exact period when the name "Tamil" came to be applied to the language is unclear, as is the precise etymology of the name. The earliest attested use of the name is found in Tholkappiyam, which is dated as early as 1st century BC.[55] Southworth suggests that the name comes from tam-miḻ > tam-iḻ 'self-speak', or 'one's own speech'.[56](see Southworth's derivation of Sanskrit term for "others" or Mleccha) Kamil Zvelebil suggests an etymology of tam-iḻ, with tam meaning "self" or "one's self", and "-iḻ" having the connotation of "unfolding sound". Alternatively, he suggests a derivation of tamiḻ < tam-iḻ < *tav-iḻ < *tak-iḻ, meaning in origin "the proper process (of speaking)".[57]

The Tamil Lexicon of University of Madras defines the word 'Tamil' as 'sweetness'.[58] S.V Subramanian suggests the meaning 'sweet sound' from 'tam'- sweet and 'il'- 'sound'.[59]

Tamil hymn from Thiruppugazh

Old Tamil

Mangulam Tamil Brahmi inscription

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Main article: Old Tamil language

Old Tamil is the period of the Tamil language spanning the 5th century BC to the 8th century AD. The earliest records in Old Tamil are short inscriptions from between the 5th and 2nd century BC in caves and on pottery. These inscriptions are written in a variant of the Brahmi script called Tamil Brahmi.[60] The earliest long text in Old Tamil is the Tolkāppiyam, an early work on Tamil grammar and poetics, whose oldest layers could be as old as the 1st century BC.[52] A large number of literary works in Old Tamil have also survived. These include a corpus of 2,381 poems collectively known as Sangam literature. These poems are usually dated to between the 1st and 5th centuries AD,[52]

Middle Tamil

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Main article: Middle Tamil language
Thanjavur Tamil Inscription

The evolution of Old Tamil into Middle Tamil which is generally taken to have been completed by the 8th century,[52] was characterized by a number of phonological and grammatical changes. In phonological terms, the most important shifts were the virtual disappearance of the aytam (ஃ), an old phoneme,[61] the coalescence of the alveolar and dental nasals,[62] and the transformation of the alveolar plosive into a rhotic.[63] In grammar, the most important change was the emergence of the present tense. The present tense evolved out of the verb kil (கில்), meaning "to be possible" or "to befall". In Old Tamil, this verb was used as an aspect marker to indicate that an action was micro-durative, non-sustained or non-lasting, usually in combination with a time marker such as ṉ (ன்). In Middle Tamil, this usage evolved into a present tense marker – kiṉṟa (கின்ற) – which combined the old aspect and time markers.[64]

Modern Tamil

The Nannul remains the standard normative grammar for modern literary Tamil, which therefore continues to be based on Middle Tamil of the 13th century rather than on Modern Tamil.[65] Colloquial spoken Tamil, in contrast, shows a number of changes. The negative conjugation of verbs, for example, has fallen out of use in Modern Tamil[66] – negation is, instead, expressed either morphologically or syntactically.[67] Modern spoken Tamil also shows a number of sound changes, in particular, a tendency to lower high vowels in initial and medial positions,[68] and the disappearance of vowels between plosives and between a plosive and rhotic.[69]

Contact with European languages also affected both written and spoken Tamil. Changes in written Tamil include the use of European-style punctuation and the use of consonant clusters that were not permitted in Middle Tamil. The syntax of written Tamil has also changed, with the introduction of new aspectual auxiliaries and more complex sentence structures, and with the emergence of a more rigid word order that resembles the syntactic argument structure of English.[70] Simultaneously, a strong strain of linguistic purism emerged in the early 20th century, culminating in the Pure Tamil Movement which called for removal of all Sanskritic and other foreign elements from Tamil.[71] It received some support from Dravidian parties.[72] This led to the replacement of a significant number of Sanskrit loanwords by Tamil equivalents, though many others remain.[73]

Geographic distribution

Distribution of Tamil speakers in South India and Sri Lanka (1961)

Tamil is the first language of the majority of the people residing in Tamil Nadu, Puducherry, in India and Northern Province, Eastern Province, in Sri Lanka. The language is also spoken among small minority groups in other states of India which include Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Kerala, Maharashtra and in certain regions of Sri Lanka such as Colombo and the hill country. Tamil or dialects of it were used widely in the state of Kerala as the major language of administration, literature and common usage until the 12th century AD. Tamil was also used widely in inscriptions found in southern Andhra Pradesh districts of Chittoor and Nellore until the 12th century AD.[74] Tamil was also used for inscriptions from the 10th through 14th centuries in southern Karnataka districts such as Kolar, Mysore, Mandya and Bangalore.[75]

There are currently sizeable Tamil-speaking populations descended from colonial-era migrants in Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines, Mauritius, South Africa, Indonesia,[76] Thailand,[77] Burma, and Vietnam. A large community of Pakistani Tamils speakers exists in Karachi, Pakistan, which includes Tamil-speaking Hindus[78][79] as well as Christians and Muslims – including some Tamil-speaking Muslim refugees from Sri Lanka.[80] Many in Réunion, Guyana, Fiji, Suriname, and Trinidad and Tobago have Tamil origins,[81] but only a small number speak the language. In Reunion where the Tamil language was forbidden to be learnt and used in public space by France it is now being relearnt by students and adults.[82] It is also used by groups of migrants from Sri Lanka and India, Canada (especially Toronto), United States (especially New Jersey and New York City), Australia, many Middle Eastern countries, and some Western European countries.

Legal status

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See also: States of India by Tamil speakers

Tamil is the official language of the Indian state of Tamil Nadu and one of the 22 languages under schedule 8 of the constitution of India. It is also one of the official languages of the union territory of Puducherry and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands.[83][84] Tamil is also one of the official languages of Singapore. Tamil is one of the official and national languages of Sri Lanka, along with Sinhala.[85] It was once given nominal official status in the state of Haryana, purportedly as a rebuff to Punjab, though there was no attested Tamil-speaking population in the state, and was later replaced by Punjabi, in 2010.[86] In Malaysia, 543 primary education government schools are available fully in Tamil medium.[87] The establishments of Tamil medium schools have been currently in process in Myanmar to provide education completely in Tamil language by the Tamils who settled there 200 years ago.[88] Tamil language is taught in Canada and South Africa for the local Tamil minority populations. In Ontario, Canada, the month of January has been declared "Tamil Heritage Month" per legislation.

In addition, with the creation in October 2004 of a legal status for classical languages by the Government of India and following a political campaign supported by several Tamil associations,[89][90] Tamil became the first legally recognised Classical language of India. The recognition was announced by the then President of India, Abdul Kalam, in a joint sitting of both houses of the Indian Parliament on 6 June 2004.[91][92][93]

Dialects

Region-specific variations

The socio-linguistic situation of Tamil is characterised by diglossia: there are two separate registers varying by social status, a high register and a low one.[94][95] Tamil dialects are primarily differentiated from each other by the fact that they have undergone different phonological changes and sound shifts in evolving from Old Tamil. For example, the word for "here"—iṅku in Centamil (the classic variety)—has evolved into iṅkū in the Kongu dialect of Coimbatore, inga in the dialect of Thanjavur, and iṅkai in some dialects of Sri Lanka. Old Tamil's iṅkaṇ (where kaṇ means place) is the source of iṅkane in the dialect of Tirunelveli, Old Tamil iṅkaṭṭu is the source of iṅkuṭṭu in the dialect of Madurai, and iṅkaṭe in various northern dialects. Even now, in the Coimbatore area, it is common to hear "akkaṭṭa" meaning "that place". Although Tamil dialects do not differ significantly in their vocabulary, there are a few exceptions. The dialects spoken in Sri Lanka retain many words and grammatical forms that are not in everyday use in India,[52][96] and use many other words slightly differently.[97] The various Tamil dialects include Central Tamil dialect, Kongu Tamil, Madras Bashai, Madurai Tamil, Nellai Tamil, kumari Tamil in India and Batticaloa Tamil dialect, Jaffna Tamil dialect, Negombo Tamil dialect in Sri Lanka. Sankethi dialect in Karnataka has been heavily influenced by Kannada.

Oppaari Song, sung by women during a death ceremony.

Loanword variations

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See also: Indo-Aryan loanwords in Tamil and Loan words in Sri Lankan Tamil

The dialect of the district of Palakkad in Kerala has a large number of Malayalam loanwords, has been influenced by Malayalam's syntax and also has a distinctive Malayalam accent. Similarly, Tamil spoken in Kanyakumari District has more unique words and phonetic style than Tamil spoken at other parts of Tamil Nadu. The words and phonetics are so different that a person from Kanyakumari district is easily identifiable by their spoken Tamil. Hebbar and Mandyam dialects, spoken by groups of Tamil Vaishnavites who migrated to Karnataka in the 11th century, retain many features of the Vaishnava paribasai, a special form of Tamil developed in the 9th and 10th centuries that reflect Vaishnavite religious and spiritual values.[98] Several castes have their own sociolects which most members of that caste traditionally used regardless of where they come from. It is often possible to identify a person's caste by their speech.[99] Tamil in Sri Lanka incorporates loan words from Portuguese, Dutch, and English.

Spoken and literary variants

Tamil pronunciation(An excerpt from Ma. Po. Si's book Arivuk kadhaigal)
Audio recording of Pudumaipithan short story Ponnagaram

In addition to its various dialects, Tamil exhibits different forms: a classical literary style modelled on the ancient language (sankattamiḻ), a modern literary and formal style (centamiḻ), and a modern colloquial form (koṭuntamiḻ). These styles shade into each other, forming a stylistic continuum. For example, it is possible to write centamiḻ with a vocabulary drawn from caṅkattamiḻ, or to use forms associated with one of the other variants while speaking koṭuntamiḻ.[100]

In modern times, centamiḻ is generally used in formal writing and speech. For instance, it is the language of textbooks, of much of Tamil literature and of public speaking and debate. In recent times, however, koṭuntamiḻ has been making inroads into areas that have traditionally been considered the province of centamiḻ. Most contemporary cinema, theatre and popular entertainment on television and radio, for example, is in koṭuntamiḻ, and many politicians use it to bring themselves closer to their audience. The increasing use of koṭuntamiḻ in modern times has led to the emergence of unofficial ‘standard' spoken dialects. In India, the ‘standard' koṭuntamiḻ, rather than on any one dialect,[101] but has been significantly influenced by the dialects of Thanjavur and Madurai. In Sri Lanka, the standard is based on the dialect of Jaffna.

Writing system

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Main articles: Tamil script and Tamil braille

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See also: Arwi, Vatteluttu, Grantha script, and Pallava script
Jambai Tamil Brahmi inscription dated to the early Sangam age

After Tamil Brahmi fell out of use, Tamil was written using a script called the vaṭṭeḻuttu amongst others such as Grantha and Pallava script. The current Tamil script consists of 12 vowels, 18 consonants and one special character, the āytam. The vowels and consonants combine to form 216 compound characters, giving a total of 247 characters (12 + 18 + 1 + (12 x 18)). All consonants have an inherent vowel a, as with other Indic scripts. This inherent vowel is removed by adding a tittle called a puḷḷi, to the consonantal sign. For example, ன is ṉa (with the inherent a) and ன் is ṉ (without a vowel). Many Indic scripts have a similar sign, generically called virama, but the Tamil script is somewhat different in that it nearly always uses a visible puḷḷi to indicate a dead consonant (a consonant without a vowel). In other Indic scripts, it is generally preferred to use a ligature or a half form to write a syllable or a cluster containing a dead consonant, although writing it with a visible virama is also possible. The Tamil script does not differentiate voiced and unvoiced plosives. Instead, plosives are articulated with voice depending on their position in a word, in accordance with the rules of Tamil phonology.

In addition to the standard characters, six characters taken from the Grantha script, which was used in the Tamil region to write Sanskrit, are sometimes used to represent sounds not native to Tamil, that is, words adopted from Sanskrit, Prakrit and other languages. The traditional system prescribed by classical grammars for writing loan-words, which involves respelling them in accordance with Tamil phonology, remains, but is not always consistently applied.[102]

Phonology

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Main article: Tamil phonology

Tamil phonology is characterised by the presence of retroflex consonants and multiple rhotics. Tamil does not distinguish phonologically between voiced and unvoiced consonants; phonetically, voice is assigned depending on a consonant's position in a word.[103] Tamil phonology permits few consonant clusters, which can never be word initial. Native grammarians classify Tamil phonemes into vowels, consonants, and a "secondary character", the āytam.

Vowels

Tamil has five vowel qualities, namely /a/, /e/, /i/, /o/ and /u/. Each may be long or short. There are two diphthongs, /aɪ/ and /aʊ/. Long vowels are about twice as long as short vowels. The diphthongs are usually pronounced about 1.5 times as long as short vowels. Most grammatical texts place them with the long vowels.

Short Long
Front Central Back Front Central Back
Close i u iː uː
இ உ ஈ ஊ
Mid e o eː oː
எ ஒ ஏ ஓ
Open a (aɪ̯) aː (aʊ̯)
அ ஐ ஆ ஒள

Consonants

Tamil Tongue Twisters
Tamil Tongue Twisters

Tamil consonants are presented as hard, soft and medial in some grammars which roughly corresponds to plosives, approximants and nasals. Unlike most Indian languages, Tamil does not distinguish aspirated and unaspirated consonants. In addition, the voicing of plosives is governed by strict rules in centamiḻ. Plosives are unvoiced if they occur word-initially or doubled. Elsewhere they are voiced, with a few becoming fricatives intervocalically. Nasals and approximants are always voiced.[104]

Tamil is characterised by its use of more than one type of coronal consonants: like many of the other languages of India, it contains a series of retroflex consonants. Notably, the Tamil retroflex series includes the retroflex approximant /ɻ/ (ழ) (example Tamil; often transcribed 'zh'), which is absent in the Indo-Aryan languages. Among the other Dravidian languages, the retroflex approximant also occurs in Malayalam (for example in 'Kozhikode'), disappeared from spoken Kannada around 1000 AD (although the character is still written, and exists in Unicode), and was never present in Telugu. In many dialects of colloquial Tamil, this consonant is seen as disappearing and shifting to the alveolar lateral approximant /l/.[105] Dental and alveolar consonants also historically contrasted with each other, a typically Dravidian trait not found in the neighbouring Indo-Aryan languages. While this distinction can still be seen in the written language, it has been largely lost in colloquial spoken Tamil, and even in literary usage the letters ந (dental) and ன (alveolar) may be seen as allophonic.[106] Likewise, the historical alveolar stop has transformed into a trill consonant in many modern dialects.

A chart of the Tamil consonant phonemes in the International Phonetic Alphabet follows:[96]

Labial Dental Alveolar Retroflex Palatal Velar
Plosives p t̪ t ʈ t͡ɕ k
ப த ற ட ச க
Nasals m n̪ n ɳ ȵ ŋ
ம ந ன ண ஞ ங
Tap ɽ
ர
Central approximants ʋ ɻ j
வ ழ ய
Lateral approximants l̪ ɭ
ல ள

The plosives have voiced allophones in predictable contexts. The sounds /f/ and /ʂ/ are peripheral to the phonology of Tamil, being found only in loanwords and frequently replaced by native sounds. There are well-defined rules for elision in Tamil categorised into classes based on the phoneme which undergoes elision.

Āytam

Classical Tamil also had a phoneme called the Āytam, written as ‘ஃ'. Tamil grammarians of the time classified it as a dependent phoneme (or restricted phoneme[107]) (cārpeḻuttu), but it is very rare in modern Tamil. The rules of pronunciation given in the Tolkāppiyam, a text on the grammar of Classical Tamil, suggest that the āytam could have glottalised the sounds it was combined with. It has also been suggested that the āytam was used to represent the voiced implosive (or closing part or the first half) of geminated voiced plosives inside a word.[108] The Āytam, in modern Tamil, is also used to convert p to f when writing English words using the Tamil script.

Numerals and symbols

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Main article: Tamil numerals

Apart from the usual numerals, Tamil also has numerals for 10, 100 and 1000. Symbols for day, month, year, debit, credit, as above, rupee, and numeral are present as well.Tamil also uses several historical fractional signs.

zero one two three four five six seven eight nine ten hundred thousand
௦ ௧ ௨ ௩ ௪ ௫ ௬ ௭ ௮ ௯ ௰ ௱ ௲
day month year debit credit as above rupee numeral
௳ ௴ ௵ ௶ ௷ ௸ ௹ ௺

Grammar

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Main article: Tamil grammar

Tamil employs agglutinative grammar, where suffixes are used to mark noun class, number, and case, verb tense and other grammatical categories. Tamil's standard metalinguistic terminology and scholarly vocabulary is itself Tamil, as opposed to the Sanskrit that is standard for most Aryan languages.[109][110]

Much of Tamil grammar is extensively described in the oldest known grammar book for Tamil, the Tolkāppiyam. Modern Tamil writing is largely based on the 13th century grammar Naṉṉūl which restated and clarified the rules of the Tolkāppiyam, with some modifications. Traditional Tamil grammar consists of five parts, namely eḻuttu, sol, poruḷ, yāppu, aṇi. Of these, the last two are mostly applied in poetry.[111]

Tamil words consist of a lexical root to which one or more affixes are attached. Most Tamil affixes are suffixes. Tamil suffixes can be derivational suffixes, which either change the part of speech of the word or its meaning, or inflectional suffixes, which mark categories such as person, number, mood, tense, etc. There is no absolute limit on the length and extent of agglutination, which can lead to long words with a large number of suffixes.

Morphology

Tamil nouns (and pronouns) are classified into two super-classes (tiṇai)—the "rational" (uyartiṇai), and the "irrational" (akṟiṇai)—which include a total of five classes (pāl, which literally means ‘gender'). Humans and deities are classified as "rational", and all other nouns (animals, objects, abstract nouns) are classified as irrational. The "rational" nouns and pronouns belong to one of three classes (pāl)—masculine singular, feminine singular, and rational plural. The "irrational" nouns and pronouns belong to one of two classes: irrational singular and irrational plural. The pāl is often indicated through suffixes. The plural form for rational nouns may be used as an honorific, gender-neutral, singular form.[112]

Suffixes are used to perform the functions of cases or postpositions. Traditional grammarians tried to group the various suffixes into eight cases corresponding to the cases used in Sanskrit. These were the nominative, accusative, dative, sociative, genitive, instrumental, locative, and ablative. Modern grammarians argue that this classification is artificial,[113] and that Tamil usage is best understood if each suffix or combination of suffixes is seen as marking a separate case.[101] Tamil nouns can take one of four prefixes, i, a, u, and e which are functionally equivalent to the demonstratives in English.

Tamil verbs are also inflected through the use of suffixes. A typical Tamil verb form will have a number of suffixes, which show person, number, mood, tense, and voice.

  • Person and number are indicated by suffixing the oblique case of the relevant pronoun. The suffixes to indicate tenses and voice are formed from grammatical particles, which are added to the stem.
  • Tamil has two voices. The first indicates that the subject of the sentence undergoes or is the object of the action named by the verb stem, and the second indicates that the subject of the sentence directs the action referred to by the verb stem.
  • Tamil has three simple tenses—past, present, and future—indicated by the suffixes, as well as a series of perfects indicated by compound suffixes. Mood is implicit in Tamil, and is normally reflected by the same morphemes which mark tense categories. Tamil verbs also mark evidentiality, through the addition of the hearsay clitic ām.[114]

Traditional grammars of Tamil do not distinguish between adjectives and adverbs, including both of them under the category uriccol, although modern grammarians tend to distinguish between them on morphological and syntactical grounds.[115] Tamil has a large number of ideophones that act as adverbs indicating the way the object in a given state "says" or "sounds".[116]

Tamil does not have articles. Definiteness and indefiniteness are either indicated by special grammatical devices, such as using the number "one" as an indefinite article, or by the context.[117] In the first person plural, Tamil makes a distinction between inclusive pronouns நாம் nām (we), நமது namatu (our) that include the addressee and exclusive pronouns நாங்கள் nāṅkaḷ (we), எமது ematu (our) that do not.[117]

Syntax

Tamil is a consistently head-final language. The verb comes at the end of the clause, with a typical word order of subject–object–verb (SOV).[118][119] However, word order in Tamil is also flexible, so that surface permutations of the SOV order are possible with different pragmatic effects. Tamil has postpositions rather than prepositions. Demonstratives and modifiers precede the noun within the noun phrase. Subordinate clauses precede the verb of the matrix clause.

Tamil is a null-subject language. Not all Tamil sentences have subjects, verbs, and objects. It is possible to construct grammatically valid and meaningful sentences which lack one or more of the three. For example, a sentence may only have a verb—such as muṭintuviṭṭatu ("completed")—or only a subject and object, without a verb such as atu eṉ vīṭu ("That [is] my house"). Tamil does not have a copula (a linking verb equivalent to the word is). The word is included in the translations only to convey the meaning more easily.

Vocabulary

The vocabulary of Tamil is mainly Dravidian. A strong sense of linguistic purism is found in Modern Tamil,[120] which opposes the use of foreign loanwords.[121] Nonetheless, a number of words used in classical and modern Tamil are loanwords from the languages of neighbouring groups, or with whom the Tamils had trading links, including Munda (for example, tavaḷai "frog" from Munda tabeg), Malay (e.g. cavvarici "sago" from Malay sāgu), Chinese (for example, campān "skiff" from Chinese san-pan) and Greek (for example, ora from Greek ὥρα). In more modern times, Tamil has imported words from Urdu and Marathi, reflecting groups that have influenced the Tamil area at various points of time, and from neighbouring languages such as Telugu, Kannada, and Sinhala. During the modern period, words have also been adapted from European languages, such as Portuguese, French, and English.[122]

The strongest impact of purism in Tamil has been on words taken from Sanskrit. During its history, Tamil, along with other Dravidian languages like Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam etc., was influenced by Sanskrit in terms of vocabulary, grammar and literary styles,[123][124][125][126] reflecting the increased trend of Sanskritisation in the Tamil country.[127] Tamil vocabulary never became quite as heavily Sanskritised as that of the other Dravidian languages, and unlike in those languages, it was and remains possible to express complex ideas (including in science, art, religion and law) without the use of Sanskrit loan words.[128][129][130] In addition, Sanskritisation was actively resisted by a number of authors of the late medieval period,[131] culminating in the 20th century in a movement called taṉit tamiḻ iyakkam (meaning "pure Tamil movement"), led by Parithimaar Kalaignar and Maraimalai Adigal, which sought to remove the accumulated influence of Sanskrit on Tamil.[132] As a result of this, Tamil in formal documents, literature and public speeches has seen a marked decline in the use Sanskrit loan words in the past few decades,[133] under some estimates having fallen from 40–50% to about 20%.[73] As a result, the Prakrit and Sanskrit loan words used in modern Tamil are, unlike in some other Dravidian languages, restricted mainly to some spiritual terminology and abstract nouns.[134]

In the 20th century, institutions and learned bodies have, with government support, generated technical dictionaries for Tamil containing neologisms and words derived from Tamil roots to replace loan words from English and other languages.[71]

Influence

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Main article: Words of Tamil origin

Words of Tamil origin occur in other languages. A notable example of a word in worldwide use with Dravidian (not specifically Tamil) etymology is orange, via Sanskrit nāraṅga from a Dravidian predecessor of Tamil nartankāy "fragrant fruit". Anaconda is word of Tamil origin anai-kondra meaning elephant killer[135] Examples in English include cheroot (churuṭṭu meaning "rolled up"),[136] mango (from mangai),[136] mulligatawny (from miḷaku taṉṉir, "pepper water"), pariah (from paraiyan), curry (from kari),[137] and catamaran (from kaṭṭu maram, "bundled logs").[136] Congee (from Kanji - rice porridge or gruel)[138]

See also

Footnotes

  1. ↑ Mikael Parkvall, "Världens 100 största språk 2007" (The World's 100 Largest Languages in 2007), in Nationalencyklopedin
  2. ↑ Tamil language at Ethnologue (16th ed., 2009)
  3. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  4. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  5. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  6. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  7. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  8. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  9. ↑ Department of Official Languages. Government of Srilanka
  10. ↑ Republic of Singapore Independence Act, s.7. Republic of Singapore
  11. ↑ Tamil Schools. Indianmalaysian.com. Retrieved 28 July 2013.
  12. ↑ Ghazali, Kamila (2010). UN Chronicle – National Identity and Minority Languages. United Nations.
  13. ↑ http://www.thehindu.com/2004/06/09/stories/2004060903251500.htm
  14. ↑ http://murugan.org/research/sivasupramaniam.htm
  15. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  16. ↑ Subramaniyan, S. (December 1998) Tamil Language and Murukan Worship in South Africa. First International Conference Seminar on Skanda-Murukan
  17. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  18. ↑ Baumann, Martin. Immigrant Hinduism in Germany: Tamils from Sri Lanka and Their Temples. The Pluralism Project, Harvard University
  19. ↑ Tamil Indonesians. tamilnation.co
  20. ↑ 20.0 20.1 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  21. ↑ Steever 1998, pp. 6–9
  22. ↑ [1] ,'Rudimentary Tamil-Brahmi script' unearthed at Adichanallur
  23. ↑ [2] 2,200-year-old Tamil-Brahmi inscription found on Samanamalai
  24. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  25. ↑ Hart, George L. Statement on the Status of Tamil as a Classical Language, University of California Berkeley Department of South Asian Studies – Tamil
  26. ↑ Zvelebil 1992, p. 12: "...the most acceptable periodisation which has so far been suggested for the development of Tamil writing seems to me to be that of A Chidambaranatha Chettiar (1907–1967): 1. Sangam Literature – 200BC to AD 200; 2. Post Sangam literature – AD 200 – AD 600; 3. Early Medieval literature – AD 600 to AD 1200; 4. Later Medieval literature – AD 1200 to AD 1800; 5. Pre-Modern literature – AD 1800 to 1900"
  27. ↑ Definitive Editions of Ancient Tamil Works. Classical Tamil, Government of India
  28. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  29. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found. at p. 610
  30. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  31. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  32. ↑ 32.0 32.1 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  33. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  34. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
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  37. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  38. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  39. ↑ India 2001: A Reference Annual 2001. Compiled and edited by Research, Reference and Training Division, Publications Division, New Delhi: Government of India, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting.
  40. ↑ Krishnamurti 2003, p. 19
  41. ↑ Perumal, A. K. (2005) Manorama Yearbook (Tamil), pp. 302–318.
  42. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  43. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  44. ↑ Andronov 1970, p. 21
  45. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  46. ↑ Mahadevan 2003, pp. 199–205
  47. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  48. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  49. ↑ Southworth 2005, pp. 249–250
  50. ↑ Southworth 2005, pp. 250–251
  51. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  52. ↑ 52.0 52.1 52.2 52.3 52.4 Lehmann 1998, pp. 75–76
  53. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  54. ↑ Sumathi Ramaswamy, Passions of the Tongue: Language Devotion in Tamil India, 1891–1970, p. 87, 1997
  55. ↑ Zvelebil 1992, p. x
  56. ↑ Southworth 1998, pp. 129–132
  57. ↑ Zvelebil 1992, p. ix–xvi
  58. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found. (Online edition at the University of Chicago)
  59. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  60. ↑ Mahadevan 2003, pp. 90–95
  61. ↑ Kuiper 1958, p. 194
  62. ↑ Meenakshisundaran 1965, pp. 132–133
  63. ↑ Kuiper 1958, pp. 213–215
  64. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found. at pp. 284–285
  65. ↑ Shapiro & Schiffman 1983, p. 2
  66. ↑ Annamalai & Steever 1998, p. 100
  67. ↑ Steever 2005, pp. 107–8
  68. ↑ Meenakshisundaran 1965, p. 125
  69. ↑ Meenakshisundaran 1965, pp. 122–123
  70. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found. at pp. 65–69
  71. ↑ 71.0 71.1 Ramaswamy 1997
  72. ↑ Ramaswamy 1997: "Dravidianism, too, lent its support to the contestatory classicist project, motivated principally by the political imperative of countering (Sanskritic) Indian nationalism... It was not until the DMK came to power in 1967 that such demands were fulfilled, and the pure Tamil cause received a boost, although purification efforts are not particularly high on the agenda of either the Dravidian movement or the Dravidianist idiom of tamiḻppaṟṟu."
  73. ↑ 73.0 73.1 Krishnamurti 2003, p. 480
  74. ↑ Talbot 2001, pp. 27–37
  75. ↑ Murthy et al. 1990, pp. 85–106
  76. ↑ Ramstedt 2004, p. 243
  77. ↑ 2008 Kesavapany, p. 60
  78. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  79. ↑ Sunny, Sanjesh (21 September 2010) Tamil Hindus in Karachi. Pakistan Hindu Post
  80. ↑ Raman, B. (15 July 2002) Osama's shadow on Sri Lanka?. The Hindu Business Line
  81. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
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  85. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  86. ↑ Bharadwaj, Ajay (7 March 2010) Punjabi edges out Tamil in Haryana. DNA India
  87. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  88. ↑ Natarajan, Swaminathan (6 March 2014) Myanmar's Tamils seek to protect their identity. BBC
  89. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  90. ↑ Vasan, S. S. (October 2004) Recognising a classic. The Hindu
  91. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  92. ↑ India sets up classical languages. BBC. 17 August 2004.
  93. ↑ "Sanskrit to be declared classical language". The Hindu. 28 October 2005.
  94. ↑ Arokianathan, S. Writing and Diglossic: A Case Study of Tamil Radio Plays. ciil-ebooks.net
  95. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  96. ↑ 96.0 96.1 Annamalai & Steever 1998, pp. 100–28
  97. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  98. ↑ Thiru. Mu (1978). Kovintācāriyar, Vāḻaiyaṭi vāḻai Lifco, Madras, pp. 26–39.
  99. ↑ Krishnamurti, Bhadriraju (2013) "Tamil dialects" in Tamil language. Encyclopædia Britannica Online
  100. ↑ Schiffman, Harold (1997). "Diglossia as a Sociolinguistic Situation", in Florian Coulmas (ed.), The Handbook of Sociolinguistics. London: Basil Blackwell, Ltd. pp. 205 ff.
  101. ↑ 101.0 101.1 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  102. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found. at p. 360.
  103. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  104. ↑ See e.g. the pronunciation guidelines in G.U. Pope (1868). A Tamil hand-book, or, Full introduction to the common dialect of that language. (3rd ed.). Madras, Higginbotham & Co.
  105. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
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  107. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  108. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  109. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  110. ↑ Ramanujam, A. K.; Dharwadker, V. (eds.) (2000) The collected essays of A.K. Ramanujam, Oxford University Press, p. 111. ISBN 0195639375
  111. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  112. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  113. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  114. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  115. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
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  117. ↑ 117.0 117.1 Annamalai & Steever 1998, p. 109
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  120. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  121. ↑ Krishnamurti 2003, p. 480.
  122. ↑ Meenakshisundaran 1965, pp. 169–193
  123. ↑ "Literature in all Dravidian languages owes a great deal to Sanskrit, the magic wand whose touch raised each of the languages from a level of patois to that of a literary idiom" (Sastri 1955, p. 309); Trautmann, Thomas R. (2006). Languages and nations: the Dravidian proof in colonial Madras. Berkeley: University of California Press. "The author endeavours to demonstrate that the entire Sangam poetic corpus follows the "Kavya" form of Sanskrit poetry" – Tieken 2001, p. 18.
  124. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  125. ↑ Caldwell 1974, pp. 87–88
  126. ↑ Takahashi, Takanobu. (1995). Tamil love poetry and poetics. Brill's Indological Library, v. 9. Leiden: E. J. Brill, pp. 16, 18. ISBN 9004100423.
  127. ↑ Pollock, Sheldon (1996). "The Sanskrit Cosmopolis 300–1300: Transculturation, vernacularisation and the question of ideology" in Jan E. M. Houben (ed.), The ideology and status of Sanskrit: Contributions to the history of the Sanskrit language. E. J. Brill, Leiden. pp. 209–217. ISBN 9004106138.
  128. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found. at p. 64
  129. ↑ Caldwell 1974, p. 50
  130. ↑ Ellis, F. W. (1820), "Note to the introduction" in Campbell, A.D., A grammar of the Teloogoo language. Madras: College Press, pp. 29–30.
  131. ↑ See Ramaswamy's analysis of one such text, the Tamiḻ viṭututu, in Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  132. ↑ Varadarajan, M. A History of Tamil Literature, transl. from Tamil by E. Sa. Viswanathan, Sahitya Akademi, New Delhi, 1988. p. 12: "Since then the movement has been popularly known as the tanittamil iyakkam or the Pure Tamil movement among the Tamil scholars."
  133. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  134. ↑ Meenakshisundaram, T. P. (1982) A History of Tamil Language, Sarvodaya Ilakkiya Pannai. (translated) pp. 241–2
  135. ↑ Wall, Frank (1921) Ophidia taprobanica; or, The snakes of Ceylon. H.R. Cottle, govt. printer in Colombo.
  136. ↑ 136.0 136.1 136.2 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  137. ↑ "curry, n.2", The Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. 1989. OED Online. Oxford University Press. 14 August 2009
  138. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.

References

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  • Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found. (Translated from Tamil by E.Sa. Viswanathan)
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Further reading

  • Fabricius, Johann Philip (1933 and 1972), Tamil and English Dictionary. based on J.P. Fabricius Malabar-English Dictionary, 3rd and 4th Edition Revised and Enlarged by David Bexell. Evangelical Lutheran Mission Publishing House, Tranquebar; called Tranquebar Dictionary.
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External links

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