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Malayalam is an agglutinative language, and words can be joined in many ways. These ways are called sandhi (literally 'junction'). There are basically two genres of Sandhi used in Malayalam – one group unique to Malayalam (based originally on Old Tamil phonological rules, and in essence common with Tamil), and the other one common with Sanskrit.
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. [58] The Tamil Lexicon , published by the University of Madras , was one of the earliest dictionaries published in Indian languages.
It is considered to be an epoch making work on the growth and structure of Malayalam language. [1] Keralapanineeyam consists of 8 sections and their subsections: Peedika – History of the Malayalam language, alphabets and language evolution. Sandhiprakaram – defines sentences and compound words
Tamil is an agglutinative language – words consist of a lexical root to which one or more affixes are attached. Most Tamil affixes are suffixes . These can be derivational suffixes , which either change the part of speech of the word or its meaning, or inflectional suffixes , which mark categories such as person , number , mood , tense , etc.
Tamil being a strongly head-final language, the basic word-order is SOV. However, since it is highly inflected, word order is flexible and is used for pragmatic purposes. That is, fronting a word in a sentence adds emphasis on it; for instance, a VSO order would indicate greater emphasis on the verb, the action, than on the subject or the object.
Madras Bashai evolved largely during the past three centuries. With the eponymous city's emergence into importance in British India (when the British recovered it from the French), and as the capital of Madras Presidency, the region's exposure to the western world increased, and a number of English words crept into the vocabulary: many such words were introduced by educated, middle-class Tamil ...
The Tamil purist movement of the colonial era sought to purge the Grantha script from use and use the Tamil script exclusively. According to Kailasapathy, this was a part of Tamil nationalism and amounted to regional ethnic chauvinism.
From the 11th century AD (the Chola period) onwards the Tamil script displaced the Pallava-Grantha as the principal script for writing Tamil language. [ 8 ] [ 2 ] In what is now Kerala , Vatteluttu continued for a much longer period than in Tamil Nadu by incorporating characters from Pallava-Grantha Script to represent Sanskrit or Indo-Aryan ...