in the
Government Museum, Chennai|left |left
Legendary origins Tamil Brahmi inscription in Mangulam,
Madurai district, Tamil Nadu, dated to Tamil
Sangam period () script in the reverse side of the bilingual silver coin of king
Vashishtiputra Sātakarni () of
Deccan.
Rev: Ujjain/Sātavāhana symbol, crescented six-arch chaitya hill and river with Tamil Brahmi script
Obv: Bust of king;
Prakrit legend in the
Brahmi script According to Hindu legend, Tamil or in personification form
Tamil Thāi (Mother Tamil) was created by Lord
Shiva.
Murugan, revered as the Tamil God, along with sage
Agastya, brought it to the people.
Historical origins Tamil, like other Dravidian languages, ultimately descends from the
Proto-Dravidian language, which was most likely spoken around the third millennium BCE, possibly in the region around the lower
Godavari river basin. The material evidence suggests that the speakers of Proto-Dravidian were of the culture associated with the
Neolithic complexes of South India. 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).
Brahmi script About 60,000 of the approximately 100,000 inscriptions found by the
Archaeological Survey of India in India are in Tamil Nadu. Of them, most are in Tamil, with only about 5 percent in other languages such as Telugu, Kannada, Sanskrit and Marathi. In 2004, a number of skeletons were found buried in earthenware
urns dating from at least 696 BCE in
Adichanallur. Some of these urns contained writing in
Tamil Brahmi script, and some contained skeletons of Tamil origin. Between 2017 and 2018, 5,820 artifacts have been found in
Keezhadi. These were sent to Beta Analytic in
Miami,
Florida, for
Accelerator Mass Spectrometry (AMS) dating. One sample containing
Tamil-Brahmi inscriptions was claimed to be dated to around 580 BCE.
John Guy states that Tamil was the
lingua franca for early maritime traders from India.
Tamil language inscriptions written in Brahmi script have been discovered in
Sri Lanka and on trade goods in Thailand and Egypt. In November 2007, an excavation at Quseir-al-Qadim (likely the classical-era port town
Myos Hormos) revealed Egyptian pottery dating back to first century BCE with ancient Tamil Brahmi inscriptions. There are a number of apparent
Tamil loanwords in Biblical Hebrew dating to before 500 BCE, the oldest attestation of the language.
Old Tamil Tamil Brahmi inscription in Mangulam,
Madurai district, Tamil Nadu, dated to Tamil
Sangam period ()|left Old Tamil is the period of the Tamil language spanning the 3rd century BCE to the 8th century CE. The earliest records in Old Tamil are short inscriptions written in a variant of the
Brahmi script called
Tamil-Brahmi. The earliest long text in Old Tamil is the
Tolkāppiyam, an early work on Tamil grammar and poetics, whose oldest layers could be as old as the late 2nd century BCE. the coalescence of the alveolar and dental nasals, and the transformation of the alveolar
plosive into a
rhotic. In grammar, the most important change was the emergence of the present tense. The present tense evolved out of the verb '
(), meaning "to be possible" or "to befall". In Old Tamil, this verb was used as an aspect marker to indicate that an action was micro-durative, non-sustained or non-lasting, usually in combination with a time marker such as ' (). In Middle Tamil, this usage evolved into a present tense marker – '''' () – which combined the old aspect and time markers.
Modern Tamil The
Nannūl remains the standard normative grammar for modern literary Tamil, which therefore continues to be based on Middle Tamil of the 13th century rather than on Modern Tamil. Colloquial spoken Tamil, in contrast, shows a number of changes. The negative conjugation of verbs, for example, has fallen out of use in Modern Tamil – instead, negation is expressed either morphologically or syntactically. Modern spoken Tamil also shows a number of sound changes, in particular, a tendency to lower high vowels in initial and medial positions, and the disappearance of vowels between plosives and between a plosive and rhotic. Contact with European languages affected written and spoken Tamil. Changes in written Tamil include the use of European-style punctuation and the use of consonant clusters that were not permitted in Middle Tamil. The syntax of written Tamil has also changed, with the introduction of new aspectual auxiliaries and more complex sentence structures, and with the emergence of a more rigid word order that resembles the
syntactic argument structure of English. In 1578, Portuguese Christian missionaries published a Tamil prayer book in old Tamil script named
Thambiran Vanakkam, thus making Tamil the first Indian language to be printed and published. The
Tamil Lexicon, published by the
University of Madras, was one of the earliest dictionaries published in Indian languages. A strong strain of
linguistic purism emerged in the early 20th century, culminating in the
Pure Tamil Movement which called for removal of all Sanskritic elements from Tamil. It received some support from
Dravidian parties. This led to the replacement of a significant number of
Sanskrit loanwords by Tamil equivalents, though many others remain. According to a 2001 survey, there were 1,863 newspapers published in Tamil, of which 353 were dailies. == Geographic distribution ==