NETamil Series 1 GRAMMAR OF OLD TAMIL FOR STUDENTS 1st Edition Eva Wilden Preface The map of Old Tamil grammar still shows many white patches, although the existing descriptive works are numerous, at least in comparison to other Dravidian languages. One reason for this is that most of these works have been written by people who come from modern Tamil and see Old Tamil just as a precursor of their language. Another reason is that the prolific tradition of ilakkaṇam, grammar, has been as much of an obstacle as it has been of help in understanding. Moreover, the current representations are lopsided in that they pay an inordinate amount of attention to morphology (which is relatively simple) and next to none to syntax (which to this day in many respects is hardly understood). But more than everything else it is the attitude of teachers that has made Old Tamil a language very difficult to learn. Old Tamil is a language not well taught: to this day there is no grammar for students, no manuals, hardly a few readers. Tamil has the nimbus of a religion, something not to be learned by rod, but to be imbibed, on the Tamilian side because it is an identity marker and on the Western (European and American) side because it discourages students from asking embarassing questions. That is the situation the Classical Tamil Winter and Summer Seminars (CTWS/CTSS) having been trying to remedy for the last thirteen years. This year the CTWS/CTSS went into its 14th year which means the beginners course was held for the 7th time. Though the Reader and the Grammar are still far from adequate, significant progress has been made. The Reader now has a unified glossary for all the texts included (however, since this had to be done by hand, there might still be mistakes and lacunae). A minor drawback is that, since much of the bhakti material has been selected for the easiest stages, many of the later forms developing in the course of the first millennium do not actually occur. This will be remedied by adding further (advanced) readers with full analytical glossaries, based on the material produced for the CTWS/CTSS – soon to be available for download from the didactic section of the NETamil website. The grammar ii Grammar of Old Tamil for Students is growing with the corpus under scrutiny which might by now be described as Tamil literature of the first millennium. Since for most texts reliable editions, let alone statistics for their morphology and lexicon, are not available, much of this is still patchwork – although within the last ten years a number of critical editions have appeared and several more are under preparation, and also e-texts have become markedly more numerous. But still, whenever I open a new book I come across a form not yet included here. An easy way out would be to distinguish strictly between the grammars of Early, Middle and Late Old Tamil as well as Middle Tamil, but this would be far from reality since chronology, even in the internal sense, is for the most part not well established and since many texts cover several strata. Moreover it would not be practical for students, who want a single reference work where they can find anything they might need. Thus both students and teachers will have to live with the fact that the area covered will continue to grow, along with the descriptive text and the account of syntax. Things might be speeding up because the community of scholars working in the field has definitely increased over the last ten years. The book is still conceived as a one-month course, true to the original scheme of the CTWS/CTSS, divided into chapters that correspond to lessons numbered from 1 to 20. But the lessons have been arranged in a way that the whole can be consulted as a grammar, starting with introductory material, sandhi, noun morphology and syntax, verb morphology and syntax, poetics and metrics. Please note that examples throughout this grammar when rendered in Tamil script appear in the form they ought to have, namely with sandhi and metrical split, while the transcript provides a complete word split. A select bibliography including the editions of the texts quoted as examples (in so far as no critical editions are available) and the references to the works on grammar and lexicography mentioned is added at the end. Many people I have to thank for enabling me to bring together the material for this book and for helping me to correct it, first of all, of course, the scholars with whom I studied Tamil: S.A. Srinvasan, T.V. Gopal Iyer and T.S. Gangadharan, but also the colleagues from the Caṅkam project and now NETamil who have been reading and discussing with me over all those years: my husband Jean-Luc Chevillard, Sascha Ebeling (with whom I devised the Reader and with whom I could discuss the whole manuscript), Thomas Lehmann, G. Vijayavenugopal, T. Rajeswari, Indra Manuel, Emmanuel Francis, Suganya Anandakichenin, T. Rajarethinam, K. Nachimuthu, as well as all the students of the various CTWS and CTSS, many of them by now also colleagues, who have been coming to Pondy and asking questions. Special thanks for one final full round of discussions and correction go to the Hamburg team, Jonas Buchholz, Giovanni Ciotti, Victor D’Avella and Erin McCann. Grateful I am also to Dominic Goodall and Charlotte Schmid, who first encouraged me to organise Tamil winter classes at the centre of the EFEO in Pondy. For the typesetting I thank T.V. Kamalambal. This book is the first to be published in the the new NETamil series, generously funded by an Advanced Grant from the ERC. Eva Wilden, Hamburg, Dezember 2016 iv Grammar of Old Tamil for Students Abbreviations for Grammatical Terminology abs. absolutive acc. accusative adj. adjective adv. adverb comp. comparative dat. dative f. feminine gen. genitive h. honorific hab.fut. habitual future i.a. imperfective aspect id. ideophone inf. infinitive inst. instrumental inter.pron. interrogative pronoun ipt. imperative loc. locative m. masculine n. neuter neg. negative obl. oblique opt. optative p.a. perfective aspect p.n. proper name part.n. participial noun pey. peyareccam pl. plural pron.n. pronominalised noun sg. singular soc. sociative sub. subjunctive suff. suffix u overshort -u deleted before vowel v.n. verbal noun v.r. verbal root vi Grammar of Old Tamil for Students Schedule 1st week Bhakti (Tēvāram, Tiruvāymoḻi), Tirukkuṟaḷ non-marking of cases (oblique, zero, locatives, dative word- 1 order) nominal sentences (finite verb participial noun pronominal 2 noun) 3 attribution (nouns, pronouns, adjectives, adverbs) 4 clauses: absolutive/converb/viṉaiyeccam 5 clauses: infinitive Mutoḷḷāyiram, Peruṅkāppiyam (Cilappatikāram, Cīvaka 2nd week Cintāmaṇi) clauses: (perfective peyareccam)/-um-peyareccam/habitual 6 future 7 verbal roots (for peyareccam and other forms), verbal nouns 8 string attribution (mixed nominal and verbal forms) 9 verbal sentences (tenses/aspects, moods) 10 coordination and questions (-um, -ō, -kol, kollō) 3rd week Poetics and Commentaries (Nakkīraṉ’s preamble, TP) 11 embedded clauses (eṉ, āku, pōl) 12 clauses: conditional (factual and hypothetical) 13 negation (al/il, zero suffix, negative stem, double verb forms) 14 denominative (pronominal nouns as predicate nouns) 15 double verb forms, muṟṟeccam and auxiliaries 4th week Caṅkam (Puṟanāṉūṟu, Aiṅkuṟunūṟu, Kuṟuntokai, Naṟṟiṇai) 16 particles and word-order (-ē) 17 modal particles (maṉ/maṉṟa, āl, amma, tilla, teyya) 18 circular construction (pūṭṭu vil) 19 the formulaic repertoires and formulae as syntactic matrices 20 metre: Āciriyappā and Veṇpā Table of Contents Introduction .................................................................................................... 1 Table of Letters ............................................................................................ 13 Sandhi ........................................................................................................... 15 Grammar ...................................................................................................... 25 Nouns .......................................................................................................... 25 1. Word Classes ........................................................................................... 25 1.1 Nouns .................................................................................................. 26 1.1.1. Cases ............................................................................................. 26 1.1.2 Types of Nouns .............................................................................. 29 1.1.3 Indo-Aryan Loan Words ................................................................ 33 1.2 Pronouns.............................................................................................. 37 1.3 Adjectives ............................................................................................ 42 1.4 Adverbs ............................................................................................... 45 1.5 Numerals ............................................................................................. 47 1.6 Ideophones .......................................................................................... 49 1.7 Particles ............................................................................................... 51 2. Nominal Sentences ................................................................................... 53 3. Attribution ...............................................................................................