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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.
In 1816, Francis Whyte Ellis argued that Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, Tulu and Kodava descended from a common, non-Indo-European ancestor. [ 19 ] [ 20 ] He supported his argument with a detailed comparison of non-Sanskrit vocabulary in Telugu, Kannada and Tamil, and also demonstrated that they shared grammatical structures.
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.
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.
As part of the southern family of Indian languages and situated relatively close to the northern parts of India, Kannada also shares some Sanskrit words, similar to Malayalam. Many of the formerly used words in Tamil have been preserved with little change in Kannada.
43,000 basic words and 519,000 compound words of which more than half are ... Malayalam, Kannada , Tamil and Telugu multilingual dictionary published by Kerala Bhasha ...
The modern Malayalam alphabet has 15 vowel letters, 42 consonant letters, and a few other symbols. 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]