Glimpses of the Tamil language

Abstract

The first of the four essays is a comparison and analysis of three different missionary grammars of the Tamil language. The second essay of this volume is a unpublished paper I presented in Poland in March 2009 at the International Conference on Language and cultures in contact: then and now. It refers to two different kinds of contacts: the 'then' contact between Portuguese and Indians showing how the first missionaries adapted their religious vocabulary to the Tamil language through calques, loanwords and neologisms, and the 'now contact', started in the past and still alive and strong in India, that one between Indian languages and English. The third essay shows the results achieved during my first year as Post-Doctoral Researcher at the University of ‘La Tuscia’ (2009–2010). After the study of missionary grammars I moved to analysing Tamil books written by the Jesuits in Tamil intended for teaching the basis of Christian prayers and beliefs. It was thrilling and exciting to discover the capability the missionaries had in manipulating Tamil to attract and convince Indians. The linguistic analysis of data focuses on verbal and nominal morphology, and one section is dedicated exclusively to some specific lexemes they used that can be connected back to specific varieties of spoken Tamil. The fourth and last essay deals with the grammaticalization that the verb koḷ underwent. It is the unpublished paper I presented at the last International Conference of Classical Tamil held in Coimbatore (23rd-27th June 2010). In Modern Tamil this verb is highly productive, and it is used in different contexts where it has assumed different grammatical functions. Many other linguistic items in Tamil developed through grammaticalization, and the analysis of the missionary grammars and texts helped in giving a more complete picture of the grammaticalization that occurred in the language. The verb koḷ is one of the most difficult among all the auxiliary verbs, because it has developed several nuances of meaning in Tamil. The essay attempted to show, with an analysis of this verb, that it is possible to speak about polygrammaticalization because different grammatical chains developed starting from the same meaning of the verb.