Hi everyone, my name is Julie and today we're travelling to the lands of ancient kingdoms and
civilizations of Southern India. To the lands where they speak languages old as time itself
Vaṇakkam, and welcome to the Tamil language
Tamil is spoken by around 70 million people mostly in India, where it is the official language
of the state of Tamil Nadu and the union territory of Puducherry
It is also an official language in Sri Lanka and Singapore
and a recognized minority language in Malaysia Mauritius and South Africa
It is also one of the six classical languages of India. In fact, it was the first to be included
in this list as it possesses an ancient history, rich literary heritage and independent tradition
India is a country that doesn't lack diversity in any sense, and unlike northern India
where most of the languages belong to the Indo-european language family
and are ultimately connected to languages like Persian, Russian or English
the languages of Southern India belong to the Dravidian language family, including Tamil
and this language family has no known or proved connections
The Dravidian language family can be divided in North, Central, South-central and South branches
Tamil belonging to the latter one. It is the closest to Malayalam, a language spoken in Kerala
The two should have split around the middle of the first millennium AD
and there is a limited degree of mutual intelligibility
So where do Dravidians come from and do they even come from anywhere?
Some suggest the Iranian plateau as the Dravidian homeland
and connect the Dravidian languages to the ancient Elamite language
Another popular theory leads us to the Indus valley, to the famous Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro
one of the first civilizations in the world which reached its peak around 2200 BC
It is tempting to link this civilization to Dravidians as we don't know about anyone else who could have been there around this time
Plus there is one Dravidian language isolate, Brahui, in the middle of modern-day Pakistan
exactly where the Indus valley civilization flourished. But we have no proof, for now
The inscriptions found there are yet to be deciphered and some scientists
are not even entirely sure that this is even a writing system
And we don't know yet why the Brahuis happened to be where they are
They could be indigenous or they could have migrated there much later
Here it is important to note that we speak about the language and not genetics
In fact, recent genetic research found that the ancient DNA from the Indus valley is a mix between
ancient ancestral South Indian and ancient Iranian DNA
It seems that early neolithic farmers from modern Iran expanded east and mixed with local indigenous population
We find the same mix in current Indian, especially South Indian population
So yes, there is a connection between the people of the Indus valley civilization and modern Indians
and that shouldn't surprise us. After all, these people wouldn't have vanished
However, the DNA tests can't tell us what language these people were speaking
Until we decipher the script we can't say if the language was Dravidian or something else
In terms of connecting the Dravidian language family to other families, there hasn't been much success
It has been compared with Elamite, as we already mentioned, but also with Sumerian, Altaic,
Uralic, Japonic, Koreanic, Kartvelian, Afroasiatic, Mongolian and Australian languages
But without any satisfying result
Since there are some but not enough similarities with several of these language families
it has been included into the Nostratic macro family but this connection would date back
more than 10 000 years and that is something just very difficult to prove
We see some Dravidian loanwords in the Bible and in Rigveda, the earliest Vedic holy text
The word Dravidian itself comes from the Sanskrit pronunciation of Tamil
which was first "damila", then "dramila" and then became "dravida"
The earliest inscription in Tamil dates to 500 BC written in early Tamil-Brahmi script
This script was progressively evolving until the present day Tamil. The early medieval version
of the script, called also the Pallava script, spread across all Southeast Asia giving birth to scripts like
Thai, Khmer, Burmese, Balinese, and many many others
In today's Tamil script there are 12 vowels, five short five long, and two diphthongs plus 18 consonants
As it is in abugida (one syllable is made by combining consonant bases with vowel symbols)
so we get 216 separate compound letters
And some of the consonants have different pronunciation in different words which of course adds complexity
The hallmark of Tamil and other Dravidian languages is the abundance of retroflex sounds
consonants pronounced with tongue curled to the upper part of the mouth
These sounds were also adopted in north Indian languages and became a recognizable
characteristic of almost all Indian languages
In Tamil, there are retroflex sounds for: ṭ, ṇ, ḷ and the last most interesting sound
which you pronounce almost the same as the "ḷ" with your tongue curling up
but without actually touching the roof of the mouth to get "ɻ"
something similar to the English "r"
We find this sound in the word "Tamil" itself, so it's actually pronounced as [tamiɻ]
And in writing this sound is often shown as "zh" for some reason, so I was quite confused first
when I saw this and tried to read it as [tamiž]
But of course, it is always better to hear the language from the native speakers
It is important to say that there is a big difference between formal Tamil which is used for
writing and for formal situations and spoken Tamil which varies from region to region
There is a sort of a diglossia among Tamil people since they should know both formal and
informal forms and they don't read as they write
There is no equivalent for the verb "to be", so the phrase "That is my house"
can be literally translated as "That my house"
But when the verb is there, it always goes at the end as this is a SOV language
Unlike English, Tamil is agglutinative. It is when the meaning is added to the words
by different suffixes, particles and markers resulting in very very long and complex words
Tamil grammar is quite complex as in addition to three verb tenses there are nine cases for nouns
There are three genders and here there is a division into conscious beings like gods and humans
which could be male or female, and the unconscious like objects, animals
and children obviously, and these don't have a gender. Exactly like in English
but with added pronouns for plural conscious and plural unconscious and honorific forms
for all the conscious beings. Plus inclusive and exclusive "we"
So actually a lot of information is given in the pronoun alone
Tamil is also very rich in verbal modes and aspects. Thanks to the agglutination it can add different markers
to the verbs to indicate subtle meanings. Let me just read this example and you will understand what I mean
"I climbed into the bucket and sat there for a while. Grandmother, I thought to myself, must not see me on her
way back from the heap of grain in the courtyard. I guess I may have peeked out to see if she was coming.
Probably the cement pillar to which the pulley and its support were attached blocked my view.
So it's quite possible that I stretched my neck out to see past the pillar – to see if she was coming.
But I must have held fast to the rim of the bucket. The bucket must have tilted and fallen into the well."
So you see how this nuanced verbal modality that shows probability, assumption, guessing
allows for an interesting artistic and poetic expression
It is said that the grammar of Tamil and its poetry tradition was created by the Vedic sage Agastya
who arrived to South India from the north
He wrote Agattiyam, the first book on Tamil grammar, now lost, and organized poet academies called Sangam
where illustrious poets, among them no other than Lord Shiva himself, gathered to compose poetry
There were three Sangams in total and it is incredibly difficult to date them
Tamil tradition would date them no sooner than 10 000 BC but it is more likely that
they were operating somewhere between 300 BC and 300 AD
We have thousands of beautiful and exquisite poems remaining from this period
Tamil language nowadays is perceived by Tamils as the core of their identity
Tamil nationalists even want to purify Tamil from Sanskrit which would be impossible
as the two languages co-existed in the same space
and infused vocabulary and features into each other for centuries
India has always been an extremely diverse multicultural society
and since the beginning of times multilingualism was a norm
It only seems natural and enriching, in my humble opinion of course, that it stays that way
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Thank you so much for watching and see you in our next exploration