Teaching and Learning Sanskrit through Tamil Evidence from Manuscripts of the Amarakośa with Tamil Annotations (Studies in Late Manipravalam Literature 2) [In Vergiani, Cuneo & Formigatti 2017 Indic Manuscript Cultures through the Ages Material, Textual, and Historical Investigations.] (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,
Primary Sources and Asian Pasts
In North India, the Gupta period (ca 320-550 CE) witnessed the spread of Sanskrit as the expressive language of political inscriptions and the final displacement of the Prakrit languages in this capacity in the framework of what Pollock has called the Sanskrit cosmopolis. 1 This shift toward Sanskritfor aesthetic rather than religious reasons, according to Pollock, who has also argued that Sanskrit had linguistic stability and had been secularizedalso took place very early in South India, notably in Āndhra. It is from Āndhra that the oldest known copper-plate grant survives: the Prakrit Patagandigudem plates, which begin with a Sanskrit formula. 2 Āndhra is also significant as the region in which the Pallavas rulers first find mention. The Pallavas quickly shift from the use of Prakrit charters in favor of Sanskrit charters around the middle of the fourth century CE. Later, when the dynasty is reestablished in the north of present-day Tamil Nadu (around 550 CE), we find bilingual charters composed in both Sanskrit and Tamil. The relocation of the Pallava polity to the northern portion of the Tamiḻakam ("the Tamil space"), and the linguistic dynamics that this geographic shift entailed, provide a useful introduction to the subject of this paper. I will lookin the very longue durée, from ca. 550 CE to the early nineteenth century CEat the languages used in political expressions intended for public viewing (that is, in copper-plate and stone inscriptions) in the Tamil South, a region that experienced the coexistence and cross-fertilization of two rich literary and intellectual traditions, one expressed in Tamil, the other in Sanskrit. I will first adopt a dynastic approach (§ 2), examining language use by successive dynasties of the Tamil South in their epigraphical production. I will then focus on a particular district of present-day Tamil Nadu (§ 3) and assess its epigraphical languages over a very long period. The inscriptional records presented here are thus mainly royal inscriptions, that is, inscriptions commissioned by royal figures (which is especially the case of the copper-plate grants), but nonroyal records will also be taken account, especially when they contain eulogies of kings and royal self-depictions,
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.
Methods in Historical linguistics: Evidences from Tamil epigraphic texts
2013
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...
For an Indian Philology of Margins: The Case of Kashmirian Sanskrit Manuscripts
The margins of Indian manuscripts have attracted very little scholarly attention to date. The present paper is aimed at showing, through the example of Kashmirian Sanskrit manuscripts, that Classical Indology has much to gain by studying marginal annotations, first and foremost because the latter often include substantial quotations of texts that are no longer extant, so that they constitute a unique source enabling us to retrieve significant parts of lost works. These marginalia also provide us with an opportunity to understand how certain texts came to be marginalized in the course of time despite their innovative character and the intense exegetic or critical reaction that they might have initially triggered; and they may afford us some rare glimpses into the practical aspects of intellectual life – particularly learning and teaching habits – in medieval India. Published in Silvia D’Intino and Sheldon Pollock (eds.), L’espace du sens: Approches de la philologie indienne. The Space of Meaning: Approaches to Indian Philology, with the collaboration of Michaël Meyer, Paris: De Boccard, Publications de l’Institut de Civilisation Indienne du Collège de France 84, 2018, pp. 305-354.
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.
Dravidap pozhil, 2022
A systematic study of the Tamil language from Sangam to Modern period from a historical perspective may reveal that there does exist a continuum of changes that occurred from one stage to another in Tamil language. Without such a study, any synchronic description of Tamil would only reflect its complexity in an overwhelming way. In other words, The Tamil language, the way it is now with a museum of complex forms, expressions and grammatical constructions, both in written and spoken variety, demonstrates a vast number of linguistic characteristics at phonological, morphological and syntactic levels, that require a comprehensive diachronic study to fully understand them in a coherence way. In this respect an extensive electronic database of Tamil texts from all of the stages along with a powerful query tool to search texts from various dimensions is indispensable. This paper is an attempt to illustrate how such an electronic database for Tamil (http://sangam. tamilnlp.com) can be used extensively to study some of the morphological and syntactic behaviors of Tamil from a historical point of view. 1