.
..
most highly
cultivated
high
degree of culture
tamil
alone stands apart
unbroken
literary traditions
most
primitive language
telgraphic
transmission
oldest
language
tolkappiyam
nedunalvaadail
melodious
language
exception
of tamil
most elaborate
philosophical
literature
reacted
on Aryan thought.
tamil trade
most intellectual
people
cradle
of human race
most important
original
inhabitants
neolithic
culture.
tamil architecture
tamil culture
STATUS OF
TAMILGeorge L. Hart |
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MOST PRIMITIVE LANGUAGE
"It (Tamil) stands alone without any predecessor.
In origin it must be long anterior to the Sanskrit Human remains and traces
have been found on the East Coast of an age which is indeterminate but
quite beyond the ordinary calculations of history. The local tradition
of the oldest portion of Cheramandalam or South Travancore makes the Dravidian
dynasty of that country coeval with the origin of the world-... As far
as present evidence goes, however, they are indigenous to India and perhaps
indigenous to Southern India'. Tamil was, therefore, the most primitive
language of lndia'
Manual of Standing Information for
Madras Presidency
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OLDER THAN SANSKRIT
"There is little doubt that the Dravidian languages are incomparably
older in point of time than the Sanskrit. It is not an unreasonable supposition
that they once occupied the whole of Hindustan -
Manual of Standing Information for
Madras Presidency
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ANCIENT LANGUAGE
Dravidian, although today a very composite group of languages as a result
of numerous different linguistic contacts in the course of time, is not
an isolated group, but the survivor of an incorporating or polysynthetic
family of pre-Mediterranean and pre-Hamito Semitic languages (as shown
by its more archaic structure) which stretched, some five or six thousand
years ago without a break, over a vast zone of the near east. Under the
pressure at different times of the Semitics, of the Indo-Aryans and of
many other peoples of various origins, this vast unity broke up into scattered
fragments. Only the Basques and Caucasians, thanks to their refuge in mountains,
and the Dravidians, have been able to preserve their ancient language.
Some of these groups, more isolated, or more numerous and compact, and
temperamentally perhaps less prone to innovating, kept their language in
their most archaic forms, like the Dravidians, Caucasians or Basques.
DR. N.LAHOVARY
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ACQUISITION OF THE LANGUAGE
God' left not Himself without witness' among the Tamil People... The
acquistion of
the language in which the remains of Tamil wisdom are preserved is no
easy task. Aptitude, genius, industry, perseverance, are necessary to the
Tamil Scholar.
ELIJAH HOOLE
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ANCIENT LANGUAGE
We have here a languages system structurally entirely alien from the
Indo-Germanic languages, one which belongs to a more ancient type of language;
for the study of inflections in the Indo-Germanic languages shows that
these are the degenerate remains of separable additions to roots or stems,
and in Tamil such linguistic decay has flot taken place. The fact that
the present day spoken and literary Tamil perpetuated a much more ancient
stage in the evolution of language than that represented by even the most
ancient Sanskrit seems to suggest that the Tamil languge became fixed in
its liter ary character at an extraordinarily ancient date, and points
to an extraordinarily ancient Dravidic Civilisation. Then again the wonderfully
logical and subtle character of the language is such as to arouse the admiration
of any student.
DR. GILBERT SLATER
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OUTLIVE ALL OTHER ANCIENT-LANGUAGES.
To many it might look a surprising circumstance
that Tamil shonld outlive all other ancient languages, that it should still
display so much virility as argues for its perennial existence. But the
secret is not far to seek, although it has heluded the notice of even erudite
scholars. The words, phrases and sentences of Tamil require but ·
little effort on the part of the speaker to utter them properly. The sounds
of each letter and word issue forth from the throat and mouth normally
and naturally, giving no trouble whatever to the speaker. That all its
twelve vowels and eighteen consonants constitute the only natural and normal
sounds that could come out from the hu man voice with the least effort,
can be shown clearly by inquiring into the phonetic and physiological laws
that lie at their basis; but in a short preface like this it is not possible
to enter into that profitable study. We have already shown that laziness
in pronunciation forms one of the main factors that lead to the constant
change, decay and death of languages. But in the case of Tamil however
lazy a man might be, he cannot pronounce its words so badly as to~efface
their identity altogether. On the other hand, the words themselves,·
without requiring much effort, flow out from the strings of a harp touched
by summer breeze. For the Tamil language does not possess by Sanscrit,
Hebrew and other cognate languages · It is this distinct mellifluous
character of its sounds that has preserved and still preserves Tamil from
any disastrous change and decay.
MARAIMALAI ADIGAL
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ANCIENT LANGUAGE
The surprising thing is that at least two out of three of the world's
earliest civilisations turn out to be connected with people who spoke Dravidian
Languages. The discovery, in the twenties and thirties, of a proto-Indian
civilisation in the valley of the Indus is considered by scientists to
be the most important archaeological find of the twentieth century....Although
no one has yet succeeded in deciphering the writing, a team of Soviet Researchers
has used electronic computers to establish the family to which the language
of the hieroglyphic inscriptions belongs... The report was prepared under
the auspices of the All-Union Institute of Scientific and Technical Information
and the Institute of Ethnography of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR.
To begin with the team used computers to make a statistical analysis of
the texts in order to get a picture of the abstract grammer of "Language
X", as they called the language of the proto-Indian texts.One by one, Sanskrit,
Hinite, Ilurrian, Rapanui and many other languages were weeded out... Finally
only one claimant was left, the Dravidian language, whose structure turned
out to be the closest to that of"Language X".
KONDRATOV
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ANCIENT LANGUAGE
The earliest extant traces ofthe Dravidian languages
which posess reliable authority are those with which we have been furnished
by the ancient Greeks, and from an examination of the words which they
have recorded, we seem to be justified in drawing the conclusion, not only
that the Dravidian languages have remained almost unaltered for the last
two thousand years, but probably also that the principal dialects that
now prevail had a separate existence at the commencement of the Christian
era; the art of writing had been introduced, the grarnmer ofthe Dravidian
languages had been fixed... before the arrival ofthe Greek merchants.
The extraordinary fixity with which these languages appear to have been
characterised ever since that period is in accordance with the history
of all other Asiatic languages from the date of the commencement of their
literary cultivation.
DR.BISHOP CALDWELL
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BIRTH OF THE IRON AGE CULTURE
"A comparative study of the North Indian and South Indian dialects reveals
the fact that their fundamental grammatical structure is so very much the
same that it is possible to translate from one of these languages into
any other by the simple process of the substitution of one word for another,
a procedure absolutely impossible when translations are made from Sanskrit
or English into any of the spoken dialects of ancient or modem India".
"In the most ancient layers of the Tamil language can be discovered not
only ample traces of neolithic culture but also the birth of the iron age
culture which succeeded it".
P.T.SRINIVASA AIYANGAR
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BASIC OF ARYAN
It may be said, with reasonable certainty, that the basic language from
which all branches of the Aryan language as well as those of the Indafrican
and Turanian languages had its origin in a region adjacent to the Bay of
Bengal, if not on the mainland of India, and probably from a primitive
language of the people whose descendents comprise the present Dravidian
population of the Deccan.
CALVIN KEPHART
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