« on: January 30, 2012, 10:30:37 AM »
As a Dravidian language, Tamil descends from Proto-Dravidian.
Linguistic reconstruction suggests that Proto-Dravidian was spoken around the third millennium BC, possibly in the region around the lower Godavari river basin in peninsular India.
The material evidence suggests that the speakers of Proto-Dravidian were the culture associated with the Neolithic complexes of South India.
The next phase in the reconstructed proto-history of Tamil is Proto-South Dravidian.
The linguistic evidence suggests that Proto-South Dravidian was spoken around the middle of the second millennium BC, and that proto-Tamil emerged around the 3rd century BC.
The earliest epigraphic attestations of Tamil are generally taken to have been written shortly thereafter.
Among Indian languages, Tamil has the most ancient non-Sanskritised Indian literature.
Scholars categorise the attested history of the language into three periods, Old Tamil (300 BCE – 700 CE), Middle Tamil (700–1600) and Modern Tamil (1600–present).
The exact period when the name "Tamil" came to be applied to the language is unclear, as is the precise etymology of the name.
The earliest attested use of the name is in a text that is perhaps as early as the 1st century BCE.
Southworth suggests that the name comes from tam-miḻ > tam-iḻ 'self-speak', or 'one's own speech'. Kamil Zvelebil suggests an etymology of tam-iḻ, with tam meaning "self" or "one's self", and "-iḻ" having the connotation of "unfolding sound".
Alternatively, he suggests a derivation of tamiḻ < tam-iḻ < *tav-iḻ < *tak-iḻ, meaning in origin "the proper process (of speaking)".Old TamilThe earliest records in Old Tamil are short inscriptions from around the 2nd century BCE in caves and on pottery.
These inscriptions are written in a variant of the Brahmi script called Tamil Brahmi.
The earliest long text in Old Tamil is the Tolkaappiyam, an early work on Tamil grammar and poetics, whose oldest layers could be as old as the 1st century BC.
A large number of literary works in Old Tamil have also survived.
These include a corpus of 2,381 poems collectively known as Sangam literature.
These poems are usually dated to between the 1st and 5th centuries AD, which makes them the oldest extant body of secular literature in India.
Other literary works in Old Tamil include two long epics,Cilappatikaaram and Maṇimaekalai, and a number of ethical and didactic texts, written between the 5th and 8th centuries.
Old Tamil preserved many features of Proto-Dravidian, including the inventory of consonants, the syllable structure, and various grammatical features.
Amongst these was the absence of a distinct present tense – like Proto-Dravidian, Old Tamil only had two tenses, the past and the "non-past".
Old Tamil verbs also had a distinct negative conjugation (e.g.kaanen (காணேன்) "I do not see",kaanom (காணோம்) "we do not see") Nouns could take pronominal suffixes like verbs to express ideas: e.g. penntiraem (பெண்டிரேம்) "we are women" formed from (பெண்டிர்) "women" and the first person plural marker - aem (ஏம்).
Despite the significant amount of grammatical and syntactical change between Old, Middle and Modern Tamil, Tamil demonstrates grammatical continuity across these stages : many characteristics of the later stages of the language have their roots in features of Old Tamil.
« Last Edit: February 13, 2012, 08:19:54 AM by MysteRy »
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