tamo is a classical language and one of
the major languages of the Dravidian
language family the tamil language has
retained almost 805 of its features of
the original Dravidian language spoken
predominantly by Tamils in India Sri
Lanka Malaysia and Singapore in the year
1996 it was the 18th most spoken
language with over 74 million speakers
worldwide hey everybody my name is Leroy
Kenton and yeah I know some of you guys
are super happy to see this episode
because you've been requesting for us to
do a video on Tamils for a long time the
Tamil language or the Tamil people but
in this episode I'm focusing just on the
Tamil language and looking at some of
the history of it now guys honestly if
you want to see more videos about Tamils
in the Tamil culture give this video a
thumbs up and if we reach over a
thousand likes we're gonna be producing
a lot more videos about Tamils and the
Tamil culture so I'm super excited for
that I just want to ensure that when
we're gonna be producing new videos that
you guys actually want to see them and
now before I get into this episode I
just want to ask you this what is your
favorite language let me know down there
okay so it's move on into the history of
the tamil language so the history of the
tamil language can actually be divided
into three periods in the first period
we have all Tamil that was from 300 BCE
to 700 C II short inscriptions
supposedly from the second century were
written in a variant of the Brahmi
script called Tamil Brahmi these were
found in caves and are the earliest
records supporting the evidence of old
Tamil the consonants the syllable
structure and various grammatical forms
are some of the many features of the
proto draw villian language that the old
Tamil preserved and that the next period
of time is a medieval Tamil and that was
from 700 C to 1200 C so the evolution of
old Tamil into middle Tamil by the 8th
century was categorized by a significant
increase in the sanskritization of Tamil
from the period of the pallava dynasty
many sanskrit words were used in tamil
and that we have modern Tamil and that's
from 1600 to the present day
and this is a spoke in Tamil today and
it shows a lot of changes from middle
Tamil however unlike other major
languages modern Tamil has not
experienced any transformation as such
at all in over two millennia now what I
mean by that is that the core of the
system of grammar has remained unchanged
throughout old middle and modern Tamil
so the two thousand-year-old Tamil
classic called the tee ruk rule can be
read by modern Tamil kids very easily in
fact Tamil has the longest unbroken
literary tradition amongst the forge of
vidiian languages which are Tamil Telugu
Kannada and Malayalam also the Tamil
language varies linguistically across
three different dimensions and those are
geography caste and dialects so there's
six regional dialects that can be
classified as east west north south
central and sri lankan Sri Lankan Tamil
is more conservative since it retains
older features of the language okay so
now I want to go a little bit deeper
into the history of the Tamil language
so as I mentioned briefly earlier Tamil
was born from the proto or reconstructed
Dravidian language that is thought to
have existed before 500 BC there was an
Aryan invasion or migration theory that
suggests that it causes the proto
Davidians to be separated out into proto
South travillian proto North Dravidian
and also proto central Dravidian then
there was a further branch called proto
central South Dravidian that proto
Telugu branched off into Tamil and
Kannada later separated into proto time
oh and proto Kannada somewhere around 3
BC old Tamil then split into middle
Tamil and Malayalam during the Middle
Ages yes I hope you guys follow that now
in actuality we really don't know a lot
about the origin of Tamil in fact the
origins of all classical languages are
really unclear what we do know is that
Tamil is older than the first century BC
when told copy I'm one of the world's
oldest works of grammar was rich
since Tok appium talks a lot about
grammar and structure that suggests that
the language must have been in use way
before that time and it's believed that
the earliest Tamil literature goes back
to the Tamil Sangam z-- which were
literary organizations that build the
language and they believed to have
existed on the time period of 600 BC to
200 AD now the compilation of work that
was produced in the sand games is known
as the Sangam literature three Tsang
games at madura capita per m and
northern Madeira are believed to have
existed now most of these works relating
to the first to sign games dealt mainly
with music as well as dance and tolk a
p.m. is the only available work of these
two Sangams the Sangam literature were
secular in nature and revolved a lot
around the themes of various heroes as
well as hero wins the Sangam literature
provides highly valuable information on
the social economic and political life
of the people living in Tamil Nadu in
the early Christian centuries okay guys
so that was your brief look of the
history of the Tamil language and don't
forget if you want to know more about
the Tamil culture as well as the
language the Tamil people just give this
video a big thumbs up and if we get over
a thousand likes we're definitely gonna
be doing that and don't forget to leave
your suggestions on what future videos
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these episodes until next time guys stay
awesome and I'll see you real soon
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