0.0. Language family and speakers. Tamil, a member of the Dravidian family of languages, is spoken chiefly in the state of Madras, India, the northern part of Ceylon, Malaya and in South Africa. The number of Tamil speakers in various countries according to the Demographic Year Book published by the United Nations is, in India, 26,546,764, Ceylon, 1,434,971, Malaya, 250,000, and South Africa, including Mauritius. 104,470. Total 28.3 million speakers.
0.1 Previous works. Tamil has rich literary and grammatical traditions. To quote Emeneau, 'they date back at least two millennia. To the earliest collection of works belongs the first grammar of Tamil, Tolkaapiyam. This was followed by other grammatical treatises. Veerasooliyam of the 11th century A.D. and Nannuul of the 13th century A.D. A few other grammatical works which are of minor importance and which largely follow the footsteps of the above noted treatises may be passed over here. In Tolkaapiyam, Veerasooliyam and Nannuul the influence of Sanskrit is noticeable least in Tolkaapiyam and most in Veerasooliyam. These were followed by an array of works of European scholars of whom Beschi, Pope, Arden, Beythan and the comparativist, Caldwell may be mentioned here. But their works, with the exception of Caldwell's, show a lack of intimate knowledge of the language as is evident from the forms cited by them. They all appear to be influenced by Latin and Greek models. Above all, they, like the ancient grammarians, analyze the literary dialect and not the actual spoken Tamil. This does not mean that they completely neglected the spoken dialect, here and there they cite examples to illustrate deviations or what they call corruptions. The present study which is entirely based on my own idiolect is in-tended to fill this gap at least in part.
0.2 Dialect and their differences. Dialect differences in Tamil are many. Horizontally, there are at least eight geographical dialects: the Naanjinaad dialect, the Tinnevelly dialect, the Coimbatore dialect, the Midland dialect, the Jaffna dialect, the Malay dialect and the African dialect. Vertically there are the organic age and sex dialects and the inorganic caste dialects. Even an unsophisticated linguist can pretty accurately guess a man's caste from his speech. The literary dialect, which is used for writing, oratory and in the classroom, is almost uniform throughout the Madras State There is another dialect which is a mixture of English and Tamil used by English educated Tamils. It had acquired prestige value from the pre- independence days. Particular care is taken to avoid forms of literary and prestige dialects. This was made possible by posing a hypothetical situation in which I am the speaker and my mother is the listener. No attempt is made to sift loan words from indigenous words. Any form which occurs in ordinary conversation is considered to be part of the language and therefore part of the system.
0.3 Description of corpus I am a speaker of the Naanjinaad dialect as spoken by the members of the Vellala community. Though this forms the chief corpus of this study, I have occasionally made use of, for the analysis of intonation patterns and for comparison, forms from a two hour recording of the speech of Mr. Sam Pandian, a Nadar by caste, from Tanjore, now at Indiana. When forms of his speech are made use of, that fact is mentioned.
0.4 Informant. A linguistically relevant autobiography is as follows: I had primary and secondary school education in Tamil and part of my college education in Tamil and English in the same town, Nagercoil, in Naanjinaad, Madras State, and the latter part of my college education in a place about 300 miles away from my home town, where the midland dialect is spoken. This was followed by six years of service as Lecturer in Tamil in Tinnevelly, two years as research student at Trivandrum, a predominantly Malayalam speaking city and a year in Delhi, predominantly a Hindi speaking area. My wife speaks Malayalam at home and my siblings and parents speak only Tamil. In the acquisition of new speech habits I am not quick. Therefore my residence outside my dialect area has affected my dialect relatively little.
0.5 Objectives of this study. This descriptive study has two parts, Phonology and Morphology. It has three objectives: (1) to present a grammatical description entirely based on spoken forms, (2) to make available a set of descriptive data, simple and useful for further work to give a set of statements about the structure of Tamil which may serve as a basis for formulating a general linguistic theory.
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