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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.
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.
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'.
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.
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.
The first Malayalam translation of the Kural text, and the very first translation of the Kural text into any language, appeared in 1595. [2] Written by an unknown author, it was titled Tirukkural Bhasha and was a prose rendering of the entire Kural, written closely to the spoken Malayalam of that time. [ 3 ]
The Grantha script was also historically used for writing Manipravalam, a blend of Tamil and Sanskrit which was used in the exegesis of Manipravalam texts. This evolved into a fairly complex writing system which required that Tamil words be written in the Tamil script and Sanskrit words be written in the Grantha script.
This is the pronunciation key for IPA transcriptions of Malayalam on Wikipedia. It provides a set of symbols to represent the pronunciation of Malayalam in Wikipedia articles, and example words that illustrate the sounds that correspond to them.