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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.
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.
Tamil is predominantly spoken in Tamil Nadu and Puducherry, India, as well as the Northern and Eastern provinces of Sri Lanka. It has significant speaking populations in Malaysia, Myanmar, Singapore, and among diaspora communities. Tamil was recognized as a classical language by the Indian government in 2004.
Except in poetry, the subject precedes the object, and the verb concludes the sentence. In a standard sentence, therefore, the order is usually subject–object–verb (SOV), but object–subject–verb is also common. Tamil is a null-subject language. Not all Tamil sentences have subjects, verbs, and objects.
In a 7th-century poem written by the Tamil poet Sambandar the people of Kerala are referred to as malaiyāḷar (mountain people). [29] The word Malayalam is also said to originate from the words mala, meaning 'mountain', and alam, meaning 'region' or '-ship' (as in "township"); Malayalam thus translates directly as 'the mountain region'.
The origin of this word cannot be conclusively attributed to Malayalam or Tamil. Congee, porridge, water with rice; uncertain origin, possibly from Tamil kanji (கஞ்சி), [7] Telugu or Kannada gañji, or Malayalam kaññi (കഞ്ഞി). [citation needed] Alternatively, possibly from Gujarati, [8] which is not a Dravidian language.
Kannada lost clusivity. Old Tamil retained the PD like tense system of past vs non past but none currently do, all have past, present, future. Common plural marker is -kaḷ(u) in Tamil-Kannada while Tulu uses -ḷŭ, -kuḷŭ, certain Malayalamoid languages use other methods like -ya in Ravula and having kuṟe before the word in Eranadan.
The Malayalam script is a Vatteluttu alphabet extended with symbols from the Grantha alphabet to represent Indo-Aryan loanwords. [8] The script is also used to write several minority languages such as Paniya, Betta Kurumba, and Ravula. [9] The Malayalam language itself was historically written in several different scripts.