The concept of ticai-c-col in Tamil grammatical literature and the regional diversity of Tamil classical literature

International Journal of Dravidian Linguistics Vol. 54 No.1 January 2025

The book commemorates Prof. Kamaleswaran a scholar well-versed in Linguistics theory, Dravidian Linguistics, Tamil Literary studies, and Tamil Traditional grammar. The 26 papers included in the volume cover various aspects of linguistics and Tamil literature ranging from Dravidian studies and culture to Tamil literary research. The initial twenty pages are devoted to give the details of the book, content, statement of appreciation by the Vice- Chancellor of Tamil University, Prof. Thiruvalluvan, statement of blessings by Prof. Porko, preface, thanks, and a short note on Prof K.S. Kamaleswaran. This is followed by twenty-six papers of which some are in Tamil and others are in English.

2011

ABSTRACT: In writing a history of the Tamil Grammatical Tradition, one must try to make explicit the genesis, the constituent elements and the purpose of an ensemble that was gradually put together during the First Millenium of the Common Era. The main purpose of that collective endeavour seems to have been the detailed characterization of a refined language, which was possibly one of the components in a diglossic situation (analogous to that of Tamil today). That refined language would be used for the metrical composition (yāppu) by poets of a variety of poetical texts (ceyyuḷ) falling under different genres, the dominant one being pāṭṭu “song/verse”. As a consequence, we observe the simultaneous transmission of a poetical corpus, progressively enriched, and of a series of grammatical treatises. The oldest treatise available is the Tolkāppiyam, which gives in its penultimate chapter, the Ceyyuḷiyal, a characterization of the thirty-four “limbs” (uṟuppu) of poetical compositions. Those limbs are subdivided into several groups, which are examined in this article, particularly with a view to matching them with phenomena attested in the existing poetical corpus and to assessing how naturally they fit the Tamil language. This is followed by an examination of the relationship between the conceptions found in the Tolkāppiyam (and its first commentator, Iḷampūraṇar) and those found in later metrical treatises such as the Yāpparuṅkalam (and its commentary).

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,

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,

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...

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.

2010

2015

Discovering the Lingua Tamulica (or Damulica): In 1738, Constantius Joseph Beschi (1680-1746/1747), an Italian Jesuit Missionary who had been living in Tamil Nadu since 1700, had one of his grammars, which had already circulated as a MS from 1728 onwards, published in the form of a 176-page book by the printing press of the protestant missionaries of the Danish Mission in Tranquebar. On the detailed title page (see bibliography), the work published is announced as: (1) Grammatica Latino-Tamulica, Ubi de Vulgari Tamulicæ Linguæ Idiomate, கொடுநதமிழ [KOṬUN-TAMIḺ] dicto, ad Uſum Missionariorum Soc. IESU. (Beschi, 1738, Title page) The careful distinction, inside this title, between Vulgari Idiomate “(Dealing with) the common dialect (ABLATIVE)” and Tamulicæ Linguæ “of the Tamil language (GENITIVE)”, and the reference in Tamil script to a Tamil technical expression [for which I have given between brackets the transliteration koṭun-tamiḻ] are visible traces of the fact that a long road had been trodden since the days when, two centuries earlier, the first Jesuits had attempted to master the complex linguistic universe of Tamil Nadu (A) by writing grammars and (B) by compiling dictionaries, among which the most ancient preserved, in these two categories (A and B), both of them in Portuguese, are a 16th century manuscript Arte da Lingua Malabar, attributed to Henrique Henriques (1520-1600), and the VOCABVLARIO TAMVLICO. COM A SIGNIFICAÇAM PORTVGVEZA, by Antaõ de Proença (1625-1666), printed posthumously [as a book] in 1679. [...]

[Updated data - November 2023] The Periya Tirumoḻi is the magnum opus among Tirumaṅkai Āḻvār's six mid-to late-8 th c. Tamil texts, 2 with 1084 quatrains and lines of varied length from four to eight feet, providing a unique oppportunity to access the grammar of its time in one text. The text falls in the Late Old Tamil period prior to 1000 C.E., a period Dr. Eva Wilden, professor at Hamburg University, characterized as developmental, exhibiting multiple morphological innovations. Included among these are the appearance of the present tense using kil-tal, changes in personal pronouns, varied conditional and imperative forms, and the proliferation of the plural suffix-kaḷ. 3 In the process of translating this text (currently accepted for publication by the École française d'Extrême-Orient), I collected all (I hope) of the occurrences of these and several other interesting structures to provide information on the status of the Tamil language at the time of composition and to perhaps assist in determining if, in fact, all of this text was written at the same time, in other words, by the same author. I have compiled this data for comparison and analysis by those scholars with the necessary knowledge, which I lack, and interest to do this work, and it is made available here as an amuse bouche while hungrily awaiting the full offering, the creation of an online searchable glossary of the entire corpus of the Vaiṣṇava Nālāyira Tivviyappirapaṇṭam 'The Four Thousand Divine Compositions' as currently being compiled by Dr. Erin McCann.

2025

My essay in a volume I coedited: For the Love of Tamil: Essays in Honor of E. Annamalai. Edited by M. Trento, C. V. Nakassis, N. Govindarajan and S. Ebeling, 455-477. Series Minor 108. Naples: UniOr Press, 2025.