Towards the Alphabetic Structural Grammar of Tamil Language (original) (raw)
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Emergence of Tamil as Epigraphic Language: Issues in Tamil Historical Linguistics 1 Appasamy Murugaiyan EPHE-Mondes iranien et indien, Paris "I am, however, of the opinion that it may not be quite safe to use this grammar [tolkāppiyam] as an absolute yardstick for measuring or estimating the chronology and the historical evolution of forms [of the śaṅgam texts]" (L. V. Ramaswami Aiyar, 1938:749) Language of Tamil Inscriptions and Historical Linguistics Given the diversity of Tamil corpus spread over the course of two millennia, Tamil has a lot to contribute to the field of historical linguistics in general. Every language changes over the time during the process of its transmission, and the structure of language, has thus become a case of constant and continued evolution. Generation after generation, as we can notice in the case of Tamil, new words are coined or borrowed, the meaning of old words drifts, morphology develops or decays, the syntactic structure has changed over time and in short the 'Modern Tamil' language as a whole has become different completely or partially while compared to that of Saṅgam literature, for instance. Otherwise we would not need a special training to read and interpret our old Saṅgam literature. A closer look at the language of Saṅgam shows how it has become distant and different from the 'Modern Tamil', and that they are not mutually intelligible. This is equally true with the language of Tamil inscriptions. These natural and progressive changes in the language defy the adequacy of the traditional grammars for the description of the language of the literary and inscriptional texts. We are forced to recreate grammar and lexicon based on the type of corpus we are encountered with. The Tamil epigraphic language has never existed as a monolithic and hermetically closed entity. Thus it is crucial to consider the Tamil epigraphic language, on the one hand, with more sociolinguistic implications, and on the other, with historical linguistic methods. Each Venkatachari K.K.A. 1978. The Maṇipravāḷa Literature of the ŚriVaiṣṇva Ācāriyas,
In Rajan. K and Sivananantham. R (Eds), Proceedings, Muthamizh Arignar Kalaignar Centenary international seminar on Ancient Tamil Nadu, Government of Tamil Nadu, Department of Archaeology, 2023
The historical development of Tamil verbal morphology is outstandingly complex as it reflects several stages of development spanning several centuries (ca. 300 BCE-600 CE). Previous work on early Tamil, within the framework of historical linguistics, has made it clear that in the initial stage: 1) the bare stems without many morphological elements were used in different syntactic functions; 2) there was no categorial distinction between noun and verb; 3) the same inflexional material was used to encode various morphosyntactic functions; 4) the Tamil Finite Verb structure with fully developed pronominal suffixes is a later development; etc.
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Historical linguistics, among other things, aims at understanding the principles and factors that cause changes in languages. The Dravidian comparative linguistics in the last few decades has arrived at excellent results at different levels of language change: phonology, morphology and etymology. However, the field of historical syntax remains to be explored in detail. The linguistic analysis of Tamil inscriptions and classical and ancient literary texts will shed light on the historical linguistics of Tamil and will try to fill a gap in the historical linguistics of the Dravidian family of languages. An in-depth linguistic analysis of Tamil epigraphic texts will show how the Tamil language used in Tamil inscriptions constitutes an important diachronic evidence of both sociolinguistic and linguistic evolution. I will concentrate here on the following three aspects: 1) Historical sociolinguistics: Maṇipravāḷa style and the development of Tamil as Inscriptional Language, 2) Historical...
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Why and how languages change over time have been the major concerns of the historical linguistics. The Dravidian comparative linguistics in the last few decades has arrived at excellent results at different levels of language change: phonology, morphology and etymology. However the field of historical syntax remains to be explored in detail. Change or variation in word order type is one of the most important areas in the study of historical linguistics and language change. We can roughly identify two different views on the word order in Old Tamil: (1) Zvelebil claims in general a SOV word order, but adds “if not disturbed by stylistic or emphatic shifts…” (Zvelebil, K. 1997.43), (2) Andronov suggests a free word order (1991) and in a more recent work Suzan Herring proposes SOV as the basic order (Herring 2000). We are not sure to what extent the Greenbergian six-way typology (SOV/OSV/SVO/OVS/VSO/VOS), can be applied in the case of Old Tamil, despite its proved pertinence for several...
Methods in Historical linguistics: Evidences from Tamil epigraphic texts - Keynote Lecture
Historical linguistics, among other things, aims at understanding the principles and factors that cause changes in languages. The Dravidian comparative linguistics in the last few decades has arrived at excellent results at different levels of language change: phonology, morphology and etymology. However, the field of historical syntax remains to be explored in detail. The linguistic analysis of Tamil inscriptions and classical and ancient literary texts will shed light on the historical linguistics of Tamil and will try to fill a gap in the historical linguistics of the Dravidian family of languages. An in-depth linguistic analysis of Tamil epigraphic texts will show how the Tamil language used in Tamil inscriptions constitutes an important diachronic evidence of both sociolinguistic and linguistic evolution. I will concentrate here on the following three aspects: 1) Historical sociolinguistics: Maṇipravāḷa style and the development of Tamil as Inscriptional Language, 2) Historical linguistics, Syntax and Information structure, and 3) Construction of a fine-grained linguistic database and demonstrate how ‘corpus analysis’ can help us mapping the process of language change and language use.
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In this two-part article, Prabhat Rainjan Sarkar 1) describes how the languages of India evolved from pre-historic times to the present and 2) presents a detailed survey of the languages and scripts of the world. This article was just published in the Centenary Issue of the Aligarh Journal of Linguistics. It is the second article in the issue. The full issue of the Journal is presented here. Prabhat Rainjan Sarkar (also known as Shrii Shrii Anandamurti) (1921-1990), was a spiritual guru and self-described master of all languages. Richard Gauthier teaches physics at Santa Rosa Junior College in Santa Rosa, California, USA.
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This paper discuses in detail the linguistic developments that took place in Tamil during the medieival period, especially due to enormous production of religious texts. Formation of many new suffixes and depletion of some of the old Tamil forms took place during the medieval period. It is stated that some of the old Tamil forms that seemed to have co-existed along with modern Tamil forms during the medieival period were mainly due to the grammatical processes such as reanalysis, metaphorization, phonological reduction, elimination of redundancy etc., that underwent rigorously during that time. The development of aspectual forms such as koṇṭu, koḷ, koṇṭiru etc., and the modal forms like lām etc., took place during the medieval period primarily because of these grammatical processes. For instance, forms like peralākumē 'it is possible to attain', when employed in medieval Tamil poems in multible number of reanalyzed structures, like peral ākumē, peral āmē, peralāmē, pera lāmē...
Emergence of Tamil as Epigraphic Language: Issues in Tamil Historical Linguistics
Landscapes of Linguistics and Literature A Festschrift for Dr. L. Ramamoorthy, 2019
The language of inscriptional Tamil is very intriguing despite its complexity for many reasons including its properties such as extensive code-mix between Indo Aryan and Tamil, adaptation of different scripts and so on. The Tamil epigraphic routines or more specifically the Tamil epigraphic culture developed mostly under a pan-Indian cultural, historic and sociolinguistic context and model. The raise of Tamil as epigraphic language should be seen as a dynamic process. As can be seen from palaeographic, lexical, syntactic and semantic features, a separate variety of epigraphic Tamil evolved constantly alongside of the literary varieties. Much of the credit goes to many pioneering epigraphists and scholars for their continued contribution to the development of the fields of Indian and Tamil epigraphic studies for more than a century despite the lack of encouragements from the scholarly circle, whose attention was paid mostly to Tamil literature and history. However, the linguistic study of Tamil inscriptions is in a nascent stage. In this present work on the emergence of Tamil as inscriptional language, I would like to present succinctly, from a historical linguistic point of view, two aspects: 1) the process of Indo-Aryanisation and 2) a few salient syntactic features of inscriptional Tamil.