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Much of Tamil grammar is extensively described in the oldest available grammar book for Tamil, the Tolkāppiyam (dated between 300 BCE and 300 CE). Modern Tamil writing is largely based on the 13th century grammar Naṉṉūl , which restated and clarified the rules of the Tolkāppiyam with some modifications.
The dialect used in Jaffna preserves many features of Old Tamil that predate Tolkāppiyam, the earliest grammatical treatise of Tamil. [9] For example, Jaffna Tamil preserves the three way deictic distinction (ivan, uvan, avan, corresponding to proximal, medial and distal respectively), whereas all other Tamil dialects have eliminated the medial form. [1]
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]
For example, Tamil Brahmins tend to speak a variety of dialects that are all collectively known as Brahmin Tamil. These dialects tend to have softer consonants (with consonant deletion also common). These dialects also tend to have many Sanskrit loanwords. Tamil in Sri Lanka incorporates loan words from Portuguese, Dutch, and English.
Venpa or Venba (வெண்பா in Tamil) is a form of classical Tamil poetry. Classical Tamil poetry has been classified based upon the rules of metric prosody. [1] Such rules form a context-free grammar. Every venba consists of between two and twelve lines.
Tiru (Tamil: திரு), [9] also rendered Thiru, is a Tamil honorific prefix used while addressing adult males and is the equivalent of the English "Mr" or the French "Monsieur". The female equivalent of the term is tirumati .
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 ...
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.