Grammaire Latine Étendue. Two Portuguese missionary Tamil Arte (17th cent)

Abstract

Missionaries, who reached different parts of the globe starting from the 16th century onward, engaged themselves in the grammatization (Auroux 1992) of several languages, one of which was Tamil. The révolution technologique de la grammatisation (Auroux 1994), realised through the lens of the Latin grammatical framework, led to a certain uniformity among the missionary grammars, which were similar in their contents and internal organisation. Despite this fact, and at the same time, mis- sionaries were also driven toward a process of extension of the original grammatical model of refer- ence whenever this was not sufficiently equipped to give an account of the linguistic diversity that they encountered in the Tamil language. Focusing on noun morphology and functional words, this paper intends to discuss where and how this process of extension occurred in the Tamil missionary grammars composed in the 17th century by those ‘Grammatici Tamulici’ (Chevillard 2017: 103) for whom the abridged version (1573) of De Institutione Grammatica Libri Tres (1572) by Manuel Álvares (1526–1583) can be considered a valuable candidate as a model of reference.