THE LINGUISTIC AND HISTORICAL CONTRIBUTION OF THE ARTE TAMULICA BY BALTASAR DA COSTA SJ (C. 1610–1673). Annotated and commented Portuguese transcription and English translation from Portuguese and Tamil by Cristina Muru

Abstract

The book is organized into three main sections. The first section, entitled 'Introduction' gives a short historical contextualisation of the author and of his Arte; it describes the physical characteristics of the manuscript, the archives, and the collections where the manuscripts are to be found today reconstructing the history of its transmission The 'Introduction' also highlights the differences existing in terms of contents, writings, order of topics, and linguistic variations both in Tamil and Portuguese. It then focuses on paratextual elements and on palaeographic insights which are relevant for confirming the proposed chronological order of the manuscripts. It also explains the criteria followed in the transcription and in the translation of Costa’s grammar, both in its Portuguese version and in its English. The second section (Part 2 and 3) is the core of the book, and it is the palaeographic transcription of the original manuscript in Portuguese along with its English translation that is as much as possible close to the Portuguese text. Both versions are commented with palaeographic or linguistic notes. The former has the aim of underlining the differences between the five copies of the manuscript, useful to the history of the Portuguese language as well as to the temporal contextualisation of the manuscript. The latter is useful for understanding the stadium of the Tamil language as it was found by Costa during his attempt to describe it as well as to understand as the Latinate categories were applied and extended in the description of the Tamil language. The last part (Part 4) is also of great importance and is divided into two sections. The first one briefly comments the model of reference Costa used for composing his grammar. It also resumes the linguistic features of the Tamil language as it was known and described by Costa, already underlined in the linguistic footnotes. The second section provides data useful for Tamil language studies as well as for the History of Language Sciences, therefore representing the starting point for future research. It includes four appendices.