Tamil language
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Modernising Tamil
Tamil Etymological Dictionary Project, 2019
Shanmughasundaram J, March 18, 2020: The Times of India
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Is there a Tamil equivalent of ‘netizen’, ‘hotspot’ or ‘groupfie’? The answer would have been 'no' until a year ago. But a Tamil Nadu government project to create a word bank now has an appropriate translation for these words.
To ensure the classical language of Tamil does not get diluted and keeps growing, the Tamil Etymological Dictionary Project launched “sorkuvai”’ (word corpus) a year ago. While the government has been allocating Rs 1 crore a year to build the bank, it’s only over the past year that as many as 16,000 Tamil words from domains such as medicine, engineering, law, science and technology, have been coined and added to the corpus.
Touted as an effort similar to the UK’s Royal Society Corpus, Sorkuvai employs a team of experts from various fields. The programme is also aimed at integrating and compiling the existing 12 Tamil dictionaries, including the oldest dictionary Sathuragarathi by Veeramanunivar in 1732. “We discovered that Tamil has 3.8 lakh words, which is three times more than English (1.7 lakh). We divided the words into 660 disciplines and sub-sections with nuances of each word,” said K Pandiarajan, minister for Tamil language, Tamil Culture and Archaeology. He said the government had passed an order to include 9,000 new Tamil words to the corpus. On March 11, Tamil Dictionary Day, a CD with 4,000 new words was released.
The initiative aims at enriching the language through new words, taking them to the common man to enhance their understanding and doing away with non-Tamil words. It is also hopes to reintroduce forgotten words dating to the Sangam era. “The influence of Sanskrit led to Manipravalam — a mix of Tamil and Sanskrit. People used Manipravalam as they considered it an elite language till early 1920s. After Dravidian ideology gained ground this was stopped. We should revive the words from our ancient literature that are apt for the present,” said Amudhan Sowrirajan, managing director of Students’ Xerox, a member of the team coining words.
Welcoming the government’s initiative, linguistic experts said any language that adapts to the needs and demands of the people is able to survive and flourish. According to Unesco Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger, around 230 languages were extinct in 60 years since 1950. “Language is the identity of an ethnic group and the most importantly to native speakers. Language is a lifeline of a race that connects each and every person with their roots, tradition, culture and defines who they are,” said Amudhan.
Talking about how the words are created, Amudhan said Sangam Tamil has a well-defined grammar to invent and adopt new words. “With the help of Tolkappiyam, which elaborates the nuance of the language from phonology to sentence structure and the importance of context, innumerable new words can be coined,” he said. The experts panel of Sorkuvai adds about 300 to 500 words at every meeting they have. The interest in learning and writing in pure good Tamil is a positive trend, feels S Arunchelvan, director of Centre for Development of Tamil in Engineering and Technology, Anna University. The institute has been conducting writing workshops in Tamil for students and professionals. “If Tamil equivalents of technical words in science and engineering are popularised, it will help them understand the subjects better,” said Arunchelvan, a member in the expert committee at Sorkuvai.
But words alone have no meaning. Experts feel the government needs to take more efforts to popularise the new words and should also encourage institutions and scholars to take up research and studies of old Tamil. “Ancient languages like Greek and Latin have disappeared. I don’t want that to happen to Tamil. So, I decided to converse in Tamil all the time,” said second year college student P Arockia Oliver Raja, who was honoured with Thuya Thamizh Pattalar award along with two others recently.
STUDENTS DOCUMENT WORDS IN REGIONAL DIALECT
The Tamil department of the Central University of Tamil Nadu (CUTN) is ready with the fourth volume of the regional dialect dictionary. Named ‘Kodaapu’ (in pic), the volume with about 1,000 new words along with citations, will be released by Tamil author Cho Dharman on March 18. Every year, first-year postgraduate students of the Tamil department as part their lexicography course create a bank of regional words that are hardly used or on the verge of extinction.
The four volumes together have around 5,000 words. “The objective is to document words in the regional dialect before they disappear. Such documentation also helps in better understanding modern literary works,” said P Velmurugan, head of Tamil department, CUTN. “While there are dictionaries of regional dialects, ‘Kodaapu’ also gives details on where the word has been used,” said S R Vinitha, a contributor and second year student of MA Tamil.
Contemporary Tamil literary works are mostly in regional dialects, said assistant professor P Kumar. “For instance, Perumal Murugan’s writings can be found in Kongu dialect. Similarly, Sahitya Akademi winning authors like Ki Rajanarayanan, Cho Dharman and Poomani have creations in Karisal dialect of Nagercoil and Tirunelveli, while Kanmani Gunasekaran and Imayam have written in Nadunadu dialect, popular in Cuddalore, Chidambaram, Virudhachalam and Arcot,” he said. Giving an example of how an object can be known by different words depending on the region, Kumar said a key used to open a lock can be ‘thiravukol’, ‘thirappukuchi’ and ‘thakol’. Many of these words in the regional dialect are not finding space in contemporary Tamil language. “We are not just collecting words but also giving citations so it is easy to know where the word has been used,” he said.
