Tamil language

Tamil (தமிழ்) is a Dravidian language spoken predominantly by Tamil people of the . It is an official language in India, Sri Lanka, and Singapore. Tamil is also spoken by significant minorities in Malaysia, Mauritius, Vietnam, Réunion, and emigrant communities around the world. It is the administrative language of the Indian state of Tamil Nadu.

Tamil literature has existed for over two thousand years. The earliest epigraphic records found date from around the third century BCE. The famous Sangam literature is dated from the 300 BCE – 300 CE. Tamil inscriptions from the 1st century BCE and 2nd century CE have been discovered in Egypt and Thailand. More than 55% of the epigraphical inscriptions, about 55,000, found by the Archaeological Survey of India in India are in Tamil.

Tamil is written in vattezhuththu, i.e., looped character script. It evolved from the Brahmic script. The Tamil script consists of 12 vowels, 18 consonants, and one special character, the āytam. The vowels and consonants combine to form 216 compound characters, making a total of 247 characters. The Tamil script does not distinguish between 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 from Sanskrit, English, and other languages. The āytam is also used to represent sounds not native to Tamil.

Tamil vowels are classified into short and long, and two diphthongs, /ai/ and /au/, and three "shortened" vowels. Long vowels are about twice as long as the short vowels. The diphthongs are usually pronounced about 1.5 times as long as the short vowels, though most grammatical texts place them with the long vowels. Tamil consonants are classified into three categories with six in each category: the hard, soft or nasal, and medium.

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

Tamil has borrowed from languages of neighbouring groups, or with whom the Tamils had trade links, including Malay, Chinese, and Greek. In modern times, Tamil has imported words from Arabic, Persian, Urdu and Marathi, groups that have influenced the Tamil area at various points of time, and from neighbouring languages such as Telugu, Kannada and Sinhala. Words have also been borrowed from European languages such as Portuguese, French and English.

Tamil vocabulary never became as heavily Sanskritised as 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.

Tamil has also lent words to other languages. Popular examples in English include cheroot, mango, mulligatawny, ginger, curry, catamaran, pandal, and coir. Tamil words are also found in Kannada, Sinhala and Malay.

The Pure Tamil Movement started by Tamil scholars in the early 20th century and lingua-political movements started by Dravidian politicians in the 1960s paved the way for modern Tamil. The Pure Tamil Movement advocated avoiding loan words from Sanskrit, English, and Persian. These movements earned Tamil its official status and also gave it a unique flavour. Reforms in Tamil script in the 1930s made Tamil easier to learn.

In the twentieth 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.

Tamil's entry into new media was confirmed in 1999 when the Tamil Nadu government announced TAM and TAB (TAmil Monolingual and TAmil Bilingual) standards for Tamil computer input systems.

Tamil is a diglossic language, i.e., there are spoken and written versions of the language. Tamil sentence normally has a subject-object-verb structure.

Tamil nouns and pronouns are classified into two super-classes: the "rational" and the "irrational". These include a total of five classes. 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: masculine singular, feminine singular, and rational plural. The "irrational" nouns and pronouns belong to one of two classes: irrational singular and irrational plural. The class is often indicated through suffixes. The plural form for rational nouns may also be used as an honorific, gender-neutral, singular form.

Tamil verbs are also inflected with suffixes. A typical Tamil verb form will have a number of suffixes showing person, number, mood, tense, and voice.

Person and number are indicated by suffixing the oblique case of the relevant pronoun. Suffixes indicating tenses and voice are formed from grammatical particles which are added to the stem.

Tamil has three simple tenses: past, present, and future. They are 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.

Traditional grammars of Tamil do not distinguish between adjectives and adverbs, though modern grammarians distinguish between them on morphological and syntactical grounds. Tamil has a large number of ideophones that act as adverbs indicating the way the object in a given state "says" or "sounds".

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. Tamil also has inclusive and exclusive pronouns in the first person plural.

Information: Wikipedia