Tamil grammar

Traditional Tamil grammar consists of five parts, namely ezhuththu, sol, porul, yāppu, and aṇi. Of these, the last two are mostly applicable in poetry.[1] The following table gives additional information about these parts.

eḻuttu defines and describes the letters of the Tamil alphabet and their classification. It describes the nature of phonemes and their changes with respect to different conditions and locations in the text.

Sol defines the types of the words based on their meaning and the origin. It defines the gender, number, cases, tenses, classes, harmony, etc. This chapter also provides rules for compounding the words.

Porul defines the contents of poetry. It gives guidance on which topic to choose for poetry based on certain conditions like the nature of the land or time or the people. It gives a distinction between Agam (Internal / love life) and Puram (external / worldly life).

yāppu defines rules for composing Traditional poetry. It defines the basic building block Asai and describes how asai should be joined to form a sīr, joining sīr for an adi.

aṇi defines techniques used for comparing, praising and criticizing the taken topics.

The script of Tamil Language consists of 247 letters. The script falls under the category Abugida, in which consonant-vowel sequences are written as a unit. The grammar classifies the letters into two major categories.

• Prime Letters - முதலெழுத்து
• Dependent Letters - சார்பெழுத்து

In Tamil, a single letter standing alone or multiple letters combined together form a word. Tamil is an agglutinative language. Tamil words consist of a lexical root to which one or more affixes are attached.

Most Tamil affixes are suffixes. Tamil suffixes can be derivational suffixes, which either change the part of speech of the word or its meaning, or inflectional suffixes, which mark categories such as person, number, mood, tense, etc. There is no absolute limit on the length and extent of agglutination, which can lead to long words with a large number of suffixes, which would require several words or a sentence in English. To give an example, the word pōgamuḍiyādavargaḷukkāga (போகமுடியாதவர்களுக்காக) means "for the sake of those who cannot go", and consists of the following morphemes:

Words formed as a result of the agglutinative process are often difficult to translate. According to Today Translations,[5] a British translation service, the Tamil word "செல்லாதிருப்பவர்" (cellaathiruppavar, meaning a certain type of truancy †) is ranked 8th in The Most Untranslatable Word In The World

In Tamil, words are classified into four categories namely,

• Nouns Peyarsol
• Verbs Vinaisol
• Particles and Pre-/Postpositions Idaisol
• Adjective and Adverbs Urisol

All categories of nouns are declinable. Verbs are conjugated to indicate person, tense, gender, number and mood. The other two classes are indeclinable.

The nouns stand for the names of objects both animate and inanimate, and abstract concepts. Tamil is an agglutinative language and can be declined. Nouns are the collections of names of Animate/Inanimate objects (பொருட்பெயர்), Places (இடப்பெயர்), concepts of time (காலப்பெயர்), Names of limbs of Animate/Inanimate objects (சினைப்பெயர்), qualitative nouns (பண்புப்பெயர்) and Verbal nouns (தொழிற்பெயர்).

Nouns of place (இடப்பெயர்) stands for both conceptual names like town, village, heaven and real names like New York, Amsterdam.

Nouns of time (காலப்பெயர்), includes units of time, names of days of the week, names of months and seasons.

Nouns of Quality (பண்புப்பெயர்), includes the nature and quality of the abstract and tangible objects. Example: Names of tastes, shape, quantity, etc.

Like Tamil nouns, Tamil verbs are also inflected through the use of suffixes. A typical Tamil verb form will have a number of suffixes, which show person, number, mood, tense and voice, as is shown by the following example azḥintukkoṇṭiruntēṉ (அழிந்துக்கொண்டிருந்தேன்) "(I) was being destroyed":

Person and number are indicated by suffixing the oblique case of the relevant pronoun (ēn in the above example). The suffixes to indicate tenses and voice are formed from grammatical particles, which are added to the stem. The chart below outlines the most common set of suffixes used to conjugate for person and tense, but different groups of Tamil verbs may use other sets of suffixes or have irregularities.[6]

Tamil has three simple tenses - past, present, and future - indicated by simple suffixes, and a series of perfects, indicated by compound suffixes. Mood is implicit in Tamil, and is normally reflected by the same morphemes which mark tense categories. These signal whether the happening spoken of in the verb is unreal, possible, potential, or real. Tamil verbs also mark evidentiality, through the addition of the hearsay clitic ām.[7]

Tamil has two voices. The first - used in the example above - indicates that the subject of the sentence undergoes or is the object of the action named by the verb stem, and the second indicates that the subject of the sentence directs the action referred to by the verb stem. These voices are not equivalent to the notions of transitivity or causation, or to the active-passive or reflexive-nonreflexive division of voices found in Indo-European languages.

Except in poetry, the subject precedes the object, and the verb concludes the sentence. In a standard sentence, therefore, the order is usually subject–object–verb (SOV), but object–subject–verb is also common.

Tamil is a null-subject language. Not all Tamil sentences have subjects, verbs and objects. It is possible to construct valid sentences that have only a verb, such as muṭintuviṭṭatu (முடிந்துவிட்டது) "It is completed", or only a subject and object, such as atu eṉ vīṭu (அது என் வீடு) "That is my house".

The elements that are present, however, must follow the SOV order. Tamil does not have an equivalent for the word is; the word is included in the translations only to convey the meaning. The verb to have in the meaning "to possess" is not translated directly, either. To say "I have a horse" in Tamil, a construction equivalent to "There is a horse to me" or "There exists a horse to me", is used.

Tamil lacks relative pronouns, but their meaning is conveyed by relative participle constructions, built using agglutination. For example, the English sentence "Call the boy who learned the lesson" is said in Tamil like "That-lesson-learned-boy call".

A sample passage in Tamil script with an ITRANS-like transliteration.

aasiriyar vakuppukkuL nuzhainthaar. avar uLLE nuzhainthavudan maaNavarkaL ezhunthanar. vaLavan mattum than arukil ninRu kondiruntha maaNavi kanimozhiyudan pEsik kondirunthaan. naan avanai echarithEn.

English translation of the passage given above: The teacher entered the classroom. As soon as he entered, the students got up. Only Valavan was talking to Kanimozhi who was standing next to him. I warned him.

Notes:

1. Tamil does not have a definite article. The definite article used above is merely an artefact of translation.
2. To understand why Valavan would want to be warned, it is necessary to comprehend Indian social etiquette. It is considered impolite to be distracted when a person of eminence (the teacher in this case) makes an entry and the teacher may feel insulted or slighted.

• A. H. Arden, A progressive grammar of the Tamil language, 5th edition, 1942.
• Schiffman, Harold F. (1999). A Reference Grammar of Spoken Tamil. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-64074-1.bgn
• Lehmann, Thomas. A Grammar of Modern Tamil. Pondicherry Institute of Linguistics and Culture, 1989.

Wikibooks has a book on the topic of: Tamil

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Tamil language.

• Useful article in Tamil
• Tamilweb: Grammar Notes