The Historical Grammar of Tamil will be written and published both in Tamil and English.
A brief introduction to Proto-History/ Pre-history will form a part of the work linking Tamil with other Dravidian and world languages.
Already available materials on historical grammar will be collected at the first instance.
Besides the analysis of literary and grammatical texts, the language of the commentators and the language of inscriptions will be taken into consideration.
Sangam index published by the Institute of Asian Studies may be made use of.
Periodisation adopted for this work is as follows:
Classical Age - 300 B.C. to 600 A.D.
Early ~ Middle ~ Later
Middle Age - 601 A.D. to 1600 A.D.
Early ~ Middle ~ Later
Modern Age - 1601 A.D. till date
Early Modern - 17th & 18th century
Contemporary - 19th century till date
(Wherever necessary, a sub classification of periods will
be done according to linguistic features.)
A tentative format of the grammatical description includes:
- defining the category (structural and notional)
- identifying the structure with examples (with Morphological and Syntactic properties)
- structural and functional variation through periods for each category with adequate examples
- accommodation of both traditional and linguistic terminologies
The work will have a detailed introduction and independent chapters on Phonology, Sandhi, Morphology and Syntax.
