Online) 40 NLP towards Revival and Development of Tamil (original) (raw)

The usage of contemporary Tamil

Tamil-Socio Linguistics, 2019

The history of Tamil language is of a pretty long period. This language was patronized by the three Sangams; it has been origin of many languages, and the most ancient language and among the living languages in the world; and now in the twenty first century, through delayed, it has been recognized as a classical language. It is quit nature, when people speak to the people of a different speech community they use code mix. The object of this research paper is to study and describe as to how change in language or code mix in the use of the people crop up from time to time, to identify with a historical basis the words of other languages that are prevalent in modern Tamil, and to find the opportunity to improve the vocabulary by coining new words for the scientific and social needs particularly for the new inventions. The Language in the Beginning The first treatise or book now available to us is only a grammar book. It treats the usages of words and prescribes the rules of the language. Tholkapiyam tells that people of our country were multilingual, and hence the lexis in Tamil were categorically given as iyarcol, tiricol, ticaicol, and vadacol. May foreign words have been borrowed to Tamil. Moreover, a language will have same changes from time to time, and after certain period, some words may be archaic, so the people of modern period have to depend on the commentary given by the commentators to read and learn the literature of Sangam period. The words used by the administrators The foreign invasions, aggrandizements, domination of other milers seriously affected the people from Kashmir to Kanyakumari, their language, their culture, etc, during the region of the Mohals, the Portiguese, the French, the British, the language of people attained a mixed one. Even after years have passed, the vocabulary borrowed from urban, Portiguse, French and English have become the part of our fridian language in general and of Tamil in particular.

INFLUENTIAL FACTORS IN THE MAINTENANCE OF TAMIL LANGUAGE AMONG INDIAN SOCIETIES IN MEDAN, NORTH SUMATERA

The research is aimed at finding out the influential factors in the maintenance of Tamil language among Indian societies in Medan North Sumatera, It is used descriptive research by using qualitative and quantitative approach. It describes the maintenance of Tamil language among Indian speakers who lived in Medan North Sumatera. The research was conducted in Medan North Sumatera. Methods in collecting data were observation, questionnaire and interview. Recording and note taking were used as the instruments. The samples were taken 100 of Indian societies who have been settling in Medan for a long time ago. The samples were also taken based on the age groups, such as; > 60 years old, 36-59 years old, 20-35 years old, 13-19 years old, and < 12 years old. Data were analyzed by using Linier Regression. The result indicated that there were many factors influenced the maintenance of Tamil language among Indian societies in Medan North Sumatera namely; age, education, demography, religion, culture, and attitude. It was proved by the result of data examination which indicated that those factors had influenced significantly with the result of Regression showed p value for the whole variables were 0.000. However, bilingualism and mobility did not indicate significance results in which the p value for bilingualism variable was 0.184 and mobility was 0.720.

A Survey of the state of Language Technology in Tamil

The use of computer for language analysis leads to the technological development of languages in general, and Tamil, in particular. The world scenario has its impact on Tamil language too. Both the government and private organizations have initiated programs for the technological development of Tamil language. The Department of Electronics had conducted training Courses on Natural Language Processing through selected institutions throughout India and paved way to technological development of Tamil. It funded Machine Translation programs among Indian languages and between English and Indian languages. It also funded for the development of corpus for Indian languages. It had identified certain centers for the Technological Development of Indian languages and funded them to initiate projects, which aims to achieve their goal. Anna University at Chennai had been identified for the technological development of Tamil language and provided with a fund of a few crores of rupees to fulfill his mission. Under this scheme a Resource Center for Indian Language Technology Solutions-Tamil has been established at Anna University. A team of researchers employed under the scheme has prepared a number of Language Technology Products. This has lead to the technological development of Tamil in many areas. Many other organizations, both government and private, followed this. Tamil University at Thanjavur, Tamil Virtual University, AUKBC Research Centre at Chennai, Central Institute of Indian languages at Mysore and International Forum for Information Technology in Tamil (INFITT), which conducts international conference of Tamil internet every year, put their efforts for the technological development of Tamil. Apart from the above institutions IIT, Chennai, IISC, Bangalore, and Micro Software, Bangalore also have contributed for the technological development of Tamil. In this paper the technological development of Tamil has been classified under certain heads nd the research works under taken and successfully completed as well as the products made are discussed in details.

Nalla Tamil: What Makes Tamil Good and Why

Tamil is well known for being decorated with a rich array attributes like the attributes of an endearing woman by poets from the earliest (Krishnan 1984:79, 98, 134, 158) to modern times. One such attribute is nalla and its formal variants. The core meaning of this word is 'good,' which is an attitudinal and evaluative term and as such covers a range of cultural perceptions. An illustration of the range of cultural perceptions is that the term is indexed differently as an adjective and as an adverb when it is used with reference to Tamil:

Sekar, J.J. 2013. Taminglish: A Study in Social Psychology of the Tamils. The Moment of Truth: Multidisciplinary Critical International Perspectives, 47-63

Taminglish is a reality now. English teachers in Tamil society are made to feel guilty about what they are being accused of doing as a profession—the teaching of English as " a neo-imperialistic language(!) " to Tamil learners of English at different levels. Politicians and Tamil activists alike raise a lot of hue and cry against the mixing of English in the daily Tamil discourses. They often fail to understand a linguistic fact that changes on account of language contact do not amount to corruption but enrichment of the languages involved and that change is natural and inevitable in the history and development of any language. Changes happen neither for worse nor for better. They come from inside and from outside the language. However, 'Tamil lovers' would like to artificially maintain the classical status of Tamil even now when Tamil society has irretrievably become a bilingual and bi-cultural community. One of the psychological impacts of such a political project of preserving the purity of Tamil on English teaching community is that they refuse to accept the bilingual method of teaching English without any professional basis. The process of language development has always been independent of human intervention and therefore, Tamil is firmly entering a new phase of its development, which in this article, is termed as " Taminglish. " Through a recent order, the government of India has instructed all its employees to follow 'Hinglish' in the Devanagiri script for official communication. Tamil has already permitted hundreds of English words and set expressions both in oral and written discourses. This paper interrogates diachronically and longitudinally the history behind the evolution of the phenomenon called 'Taminglish,' a process of code-mixing/switching in Tamil/English discourse, and establishes that English teachers need not feel guilty about this linguistic hybridity.

WHITE PAPER ON TECHNOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT OF TAMIL

2018

Tamil has initiated its technological development well in advance. It has made use of all the opportunities given to it for making it suitable for digitalization and computerization. The references listed below stand to establish its efforts in fulfilling the need of the day i.e. technological development. Governments, both state and central, funded liberally for the technological development of Tamil. This helped it to develop MT systems, wordNet and other NLP systems. Private organizations also contributed for this mission. Many individuals, both from inside and abroad, literally worked for Tamil computing. The organizations such as CIIL, AUKBCRC, Anna University, Amrita University, Tamil Virtual Academy, Tamil University, and Madras University need to appreciated for their efforts in uplifting Tamil in the era of Information Technology. Tamil has switched over to Unicode abandoning other systems. Tamil has comparatively commendable resouces and tools for NLP applications. Sumptuous amount of text corpora, speech corpora and parallel corpoara are available for Tamil. A good number of speech recognition systems and text to speech systems are developed for Tamil. Reliable morphological analyzers, morphological generators, syntactic parsers, chunkers, shallow parsers, named entiry recogniztion sytems optical character recognition system are available for Tamil. Computational semantics also improved in Tamil. There are attempts to develop word sense disambiguation system, question answering system, relationship extraction system, sentiment analysis systems, automatic summarization systems, and coreference resolution systems. Efforts are made to develop text generation systems too for Tamil. Tamil shows only positive symptoms in the technological development.

Use of Tamil language and IT in Tamil language education

2009

There is a compulsion, not option to use technology', said Raveendran N., President of the Computer Society of India. (The Hindu Newspaper 2008). He stressed that barriers including language should be circumvented to make technology available to all. The use of computer technology enhances the knowledge and resources of the Tamil language. National Institute of Education and Ministry of Education in Singapore are continuously harnessing effective Information Technology in Teaching and Learning in Singapore Schools. Tamil Language Education is not an exception for it. Naa Go Tamil Language Information Technology competition was one of the process to develop the IT and Language skills among the Singapore Primary School Tamil Students and Tamil teacher trainees. 50 Primary schools and Diploma in Education Year 2 teacher trainees took part in this competition which capitalized on their skills. From the palm leaves in the olden age when Tamil words were written more than 2500 years ago to the age of computers and internet has made Tamil a living language. Among all the Indian Languages, Tamil has already made a considerable presence on the internet. Naa Govindasamy was known as "The Father of Tamil Internet". In view of all his noteworthy contributions towards Tamil Language and the Tamil community, the Naa Govindasamy Tamil IT Award was inaugurated to inspire our young generation to engage in the development, use and promotion of Tamil IT. The National Institute of Education (Tamil Language & Culture Division) and Tamil Murasu, a local Tamil newspaper, jointly organized the Naa Govindasamy Tamil IT Award Competition at the national level to all Primary schools offering Tamil language and Tamil teacher trainees from NIE. This paper shares the process, the experience and the outcomes in terms of IT and language skills among the students and teacher trainees.

A preface to spoken Tamil

2013

This paper is a contribution to an anthropology of aurality in Tamil Nādu. Using a sociolinguistic approach to performance, I shall argue that contemporary low caste performers in Tamil Nādu are part of a discursive tradition that dates back to Caṅkam times in order to show how this tradition, the dialogue between the art of writing and the practice of speech, is actually a feeling in Tamil that affects the concept of locality in Tamil. This feeling, or spoken Tamil, is a kind of aural competence. In performance, it is a way of speaking with writing in mind. In writing, it is that sentiment which demonstrates a kind of ethnographic authority. Caṅkam literature, Bhakti devotion, Tamil nationalism--indeed, the practice of spoken Tamil has been, and continues to be, a mode of organizing people in light of the state. Then and now, spoken Tamil has never been about how people really speak. Rather, it has always been a way of producing citizens by manufacturing aural competence.