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Incidentally, the Tamil typewriter used for the project, with a keyboard developed by Yost of the American Mission, was the first to be ever used in an office in India. [4] When Chandler retired in 1922 at the age of 80, about 81,000 words had been compiled. Few more words were added soon, and in 1924 the Lexicon went to press.
It preserves many antique features of Old Tamil that predate Tolkāppiyam, the earliest grammatical treatise of Tamil. The Jaffna Tamil dialect also retains many forms of words and phonemes which were used in Sangam literature such as Tirukkuṛaḷ and Kuṟuntokai, which has gone out of vogue in most Indian Tamil dialects.
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.
The Tamil language is native to Tamil Nadu , Puducherry (India) and Sri Lanka, where most of the native Tamil speaking population is highly concentrated. Tamil is also recognized as a classical language by the Government of India in 2004 and was the first language to achieve such status. [1] Tamil is one of the 22 official languages of India. [2]
This is the pronunciation key for IPA transcriptions of Tamil on Wikipedia. It provides a set of symbols to represent the pronunciation of Tamil in Wikipedia articles, and example words that illustrate the sounds that correspond to them.
The register of use can vary depending on the situation. For example, saying என் வீடு (En veeṭu) meaning 'my house' is considered rude even when if the house does not belong to the listener as it can suggest possessiveness. For the purpose of this article, the order of register descends from majestic > official > standard > low.
A characteristic of Tanglish or Tamil-English code-switching is the addition of Tamil affixes to English words. [12] The sound "u" is added at the end of an English noun to create a Tamil noun form, as in "sound u " and the words "girl-u heart-u black-u" in the lyrics of "Why This Kolaveri Di".
The Tamil script does not have distinct letters for voiced and unvoiced stop, although both are present in the spoken language as allophones—i.e., they are in complementary distribution and the places they can occur do not intersect. For example, the voiceless stop [p] occurs at the beginning of the words and the voiced stop [b] cannot.