HTL

ABSTRACT: This article will explore the various conceptions underlying the use of the expression ticai-c-col (approximately “regional words”). After describing the role assigned to these by Tamil grammarians and Tamil grammatical commentators, we shall present a sketch of traditional Tamil linguistic geography, with its central and peripheral regions, and the way it has been reinterpreted in the course of history. We will also try to examine the actual linguistic data, the differences of opinion about it, and what they tell us about Tamil literature and the movement hiding below its classical surface.

In order to become a scholar in classical Tamil (South India), one had to master a grammatical system, which included being able to translate poetical texts in an artificial language, used for paraphrases. Theoretical discourse displays an innovative linguistic activity, when it coins a terminology and when it designates complex entities. While some descriptions of grammatical traditions deal mostly with their results (classifications, rules, etc.), this paper is more concerned with their means, i.e. with their practical component.

SUMMARY: Tree-related vocabulary figures prominently inside the TE (Eḻuttatikāram of the Tolkāppiyam), an ancient treatise dealing with the phonetics and morphophonology of Tamil, but attempting a complete botanical identification of that vocabulary is a difficult task (not attempted here). This article, examining how the individual items inside that vocabulary are dealt with, and how their treatment fits in with the global organization of the TE, aims at providing insights on the nature of those items. They are not basically free forms, but bound forms (or stems), to be concatenated with other elements, in order to obtain the attested linguistic forms, at the end of a derivational process of which the TE is the explicit formulation. This in turns provides an insight into the way the first grammatical description of Tamil was made, probably on the basis of an analysis of existing complex expressions. The language, having thus been analysed and equipped with a grammar, was then on its way to becoming a normalized language, more suitable for literary expression than a language without a grammar. Later grammarians would elaborate on that first step, in a long “domestication” process of language by grammar, the results of which are still visible today, whenever the tamed centamiḻ standard is preferred over more spontaneous dialectal usages.

ABSTRACT: Classical Tamil made a threefold spatial division (between « distant », « proximate » and « intermediate ») by means of a set of three deictic clitics {a-, i- & u-). The Tamil grammatical tradition refers to these clitics by the term  /cuṭṭu/. The technical term /cuṭṭu/ also appears inside the formulas that characterize several sets of lexemes, including the deictic (pro)nouns, for which this three-fold division is relevant. The term /cuṭṭu/ is also connected with a verb, /cuṭṭutal/, which can denote the act of physically pointing to someting, but can also express the relationship, simple or complex, between a sign and what is signified by it. This paper examines how /cuṭṭu/ and /cuṭṭutal/, are used inside classical Tamil texts, literary or technical. What remains to be done by some of its potential readers would be to find out whether this constellation of values is the adaptation to Tamil of conceptions originally formulated in Sanskrit.