Tamil grammar

Much of Tamil grammar is extensively described in the oldest available grammar book for Tamil, the "Tolkāppiyam". Modern Tamil writing is largely based on the 13th century grammar "IAST|Naṉṉūl" which restated and clarified the rules of the Tolkāppiyam, with some modifications.

Parts of Tamil grammar

Traditional Tamil grammar consists of five parts, namely IAST|eḻuttu, col, porul, yāppu, IAST|aṇi. Of these, the last two are mostly applicable in poetry. The following table gives additional information about these parts.

Suffixes are also used to perform the functions of cases or postpositions. Traditional grammarians tried to group the various suffixes into 8 cases corresponding to the cases used in Sanskrit. These were the nominative, accusative, dative, sociative, genitive, instrumental, locative, and ablative. Modern grammarians, however, argue that this classification is artificial, and that Tamil usage is best understood if each suffix or combination of suffixes is seen as marking a separate case. (Schiffman, 1999).

Tamil nouns can also take one of four prefixes, "i", "a", "u" and "e" which are functionally equivalent to demonstratives in English. For example, the word "vaḻi" meaning "way" can take these to produce "ivvaḻi" "this way", "avvaḻi" "that way", "uvvaḻi" "the medial way" and "evvaḻi" "which way".

Some nouns are formed by means of agglutination. For example, "he-who-does" or "that-which-will-become" are the so-called participial nouns. Composite nouns are formed by combining adjectives and pronouns. For example, combining "good" and "he" into "good-he" we obtain the equivalent of the English "a good man". Correspondingly, the noun "good-they" is translated as "good people". Verbal nouns in Tamil are formed from the roots of verbs and are roughly equivalent to the English "-ing" nouns.

Verbs

Like Tamil nouns, Tamil verbs are also inflected through the use of suffixes. A typical Tamil verb form will have a number of suffixes, which show person, number, mood, tense and voice, as is shown by the following example "alintukkontiruntēṉ" "(I) was being destroyed":

Person and number are indicated by suffixing the oblique case of the relevant pronoun ("ēn" in the above example). The suffixes to indicate tenses and voice are formed from grammatical particles, which are added to the stem.

Tamil has two voices. The first - used in the example above - indicates that the subject of the sentence "undergoes" or "is the object of" the action named by the verb stem, and the second indicates that the subject of the sentence "directs" the action referred to by the verb stem. These voices are not equivalent to the notions of "transitivity" or "causation", or to the active-passive or reflexive-nonreflexive division of voices found in Indo-european languages.

Tamil has three simple tenses - past, present, and future - indicated by simple suffixes, and 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. These signal whether the happening spoken of in the verb is unreal, possible, potential, or real.

Auxiliaries

Tamil has no 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. In the first person plural, Tamil makes a distinction between inclusive pronouns that include the listener and exclusive pronouns that do not. Tamil does not distinguish between adjectives and adverbs - both fall under the category "uriccol". Conjunctions are called "itaiccol".

Verb auxiliaries are used to indicate "attitude", a grammatical category which shows the state of mind of the speaker, and his attitude about the event spoken of in the verb. Common attitudes include pejorative opinion, antipathy, relief felt at the conclusion of an unpleasant event or period, and unhappiness at or apprehension about the eventual result of a past or continuing event.

entence structure

Except in poetry, the subject precedes the object, and the verb must conclude the sentence. In a standard sentence, therefore, the order is usually Subject Object Verb (SOV) though Object Subject Verb is also not uncommon.

Tamil is a null subject language. Not all Tamil sentences have subjects, verbs and objects. It is possible to construct valid sentences that have only a verb - such as "mutintuvittatu" ("It is completed") - or only a subject and object, such as "atu eṉ vītu" ("That is my house"). The elements that are present, however, must follow the SOV order. Tamil does not have an equivalent for the word "is" and the word is included in the translations only to convey the meaning. The verb "to have" in the meaning "to possess" is not translated directly either. In order to say "I have a horse" in Tamil a construction equivalent to "There is a horse to me" or "There exists a horse to me" will be used.

Tamil lacks relative pronouns, but their meaning is conveyed by relative participle constructions which are built using agglutination. For example, the English sentence "Call the boy who learnt the lesson" will be said in Tamil roughly as "That-lesson-learnt-boy call".

Example

A sample passage in Tamil script with an ITRANS-like transliteration.

"aasiriyar vakuppukkuL nuzhainthaar". "avar uLLE nuzhainthavudan maaNavarkaL ezhunthanar". "vaLavan mattum than arukil ninRu kondiruntha maaNavi kanimozhiyudan pEsik kondirunthaan". "naan avanai echarithEn."

English translation of the passage given above: The teacher entered the classroom. As soon as he entered, the students got up. Only Valavan was talking to Kanimozhi who was standing next to him. I warned him.

Notes:
# Tamil does not have a definite article. The definite article used above is merely an of translation.
# To understand why Valavan would want to be warned, it is necessary to comprehend Asian social etiquette. It is considered impolite to be distracted when a person of eminence (the teacher in this case) makes an entry and the teacher may feel insulted or slighted.

References

* A. H. Arden, "A progressive grammar of the Tamil language", 5th edition, 1942.

External links

* [http://www.nilacharal.com/tamil/tamil_grammar_175.html Useful article in Tamil]