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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.
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 words are transliterated according to IAST system. All words have been referenced with the Madras University Tamil Lexicon, which is used as the most authoritative and standard lexicon by mainstream scholars. [3] [4] In the examples below, the second word is from Tamil, and its original Indo-Aryan source is placed to the left.
There are many Tamil loanwords in other languages.The Tamil language, primarily spoken in southern India and Sri Lanka, has produced loanwords in many different languages, including Ancient Greek, Biblical Hebrew, English, Malay, native languages of Indonesia, Mauritian Creole, Tagalog, Russian, and Sinhala and Dhivehi.
Many of these words were introduced by educated, middle-class Tamil migrants to the city who borrowed freely from English for their daily usage. [2] Due to the presence of a considerable population of Telugu, Hindi–Urdu and many other language-speakers, especially, the Gujaratis , Marwaris and some Muslim communities, some Hindustani and ...
These are the main ways Tamil words are incorporated into the Sinhala lexicon with different endings: With an /a/ added to Tamil words ending in /m/ and other consonants (e.g. pālam > pālama). With a /ya/ or /va/ added to words ending in vowels (e.g. araḷi > araliya). With the Tamil ending /ai/ represented as /ē/, commonly spelt /aya/.
The rules of pronunciation given in the Tolkāppiyam, a text on the grammar of old Tamil, says that the āytam in old Tamil patterned with semivowels and it occurred after a short vowel and before a stop; it either lengthened the previous vowel, geminated the stop or was lost if the following segment is phonetically voiced in the environment. [26]
Sri Lankan Tamil dialects are distinct from the Tamil dialects used in Tamil Nadu, India.They are used in Sri Lanka and in the Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora.Linguistic borrowings from European colonizers such as the Portuguese, English and the Dutch have also contributed to a unique vocabulary that is distinct from the colloquial usage of Tamil in the Indian mainland.