Көне Тамил грамматикасы: Толкаппиям дәуірі

Ancient work on Tamil grammar

Tolkāppiyam, also romanised as Tholkaappiyam ( , lit. "ancient poem"), is the most ancient extant Tamil grammar text and the oldest extant long work of Tamil literature. It is the earliest Tamil text mentioning Gods often identified as Hindu deities. Mayyon as (Vishnu), Seyyon as (Skanda), Vendhan as (Indra), Varuna as (Varuna) and Kotṟavai as (Devi or Bagavathi) are the gods mentioned. The surviving manuscripts of the Tolkappiyam consists of three books (atikaram), each with nine chapters (iyal), with a cumulative total of 1,610 (483+463+664) sutras in the nūṛpā meter. It is a comprehensive text on grammar, and includes sutras on orthography, phonology, etymology, morphology, semantics, prosody, sentence structure and the significance of context in language. The Tolkappiyam is difficult to date. Some in the Tamil tradition place the text in the mythical second sangam, variously in 1st millennium BCE or earlier. Scholars place the text much later and believe the text evolved and expanded over a period of time. According to Nadarajah Devapoopathy the earliest layer of the Tolkappiyam was likely composed between the 2nd and 1st century BCE, and the extant manuscript versions fixed by about the 5th century CE. The Tolkappiyam Ur text likely relied on some unknown even older literature. The Tolkappiyam belongs to second Sangam period. Iravatham Mahadevan dates the Tolkappiyam to no earlier than the 2nd century CE, as it mentions the puḷḷi being an integral part of Tamil script. The puḷḷi (a diacritical mark to distinguish pure consonants from consonants with inherent vowels) only became prevalent in Tamil epigraphs after the 2nd century CE. According to linguist S. Agesthialingam, Tolkappiyam contains many later interpolations, and the language shows many deviations consistent with late old Tamil (similar to Cilappatikaram), rather than the early old Tamil poems of Eṭṭuttokai and Pattuppāṭṭu. The Tolkappiyam contains aphoristic verses arranged into three books – the Eluttatikaram ("Eluttu" meaning "letter, phoneme"), the Sollatikaram ("Sol" meaning "Sound, word") and the Porulatikaram ("Porul" meaning "subject matter", i. e. prosody, rhetoric, poetics). The Tolkappiyam includes examples to explain its rules, and these examples provide indirect information about the ancient Tamil culture, sociology, and linguistic geography. It is first mentioned by name in Iraiyanar's Akapporul – a 7th or 8th century text – as an authoritative reference, and the Tolkappiyam remains the authoritative text on Tamil grammar. refn|group=note|According to Thomas Lehmann, the Tolkappiyam rules are followed and exemplified in Old Tamil (pre 700 CE) literature. The Middle Tamil (700 1600 CE) and Modern Tamil (post 1600 CE) have additional distinct grammatical characteristics. Causative stems of verb bases are "lexical in Old Tamil, morphological in Middle Tamil, and syntactic in Modern Tamil", for example, states Lehmann. Nevertheless, many features of Middle and Modern Tamil are anchored in the Old Tamil of Tolkappiyam. or "old poem". The word 'kappiyam' is from the Sanskrit Kavya. According to Kamil Zvelebil – a Tamil literature and history scholar, Tamil purists tend to reject this Sanskrit style etymology and offer "curious" alternatives. One of these breaks it into three "tol kappu iyanratu", meaning "ancient protection [of language]". An alternate etymology that has been proposed by a few purists is that the name of the work derives from the author's name Tolkāppiyan, but this is a disputed assumption because neither the author(s) nor centuries in which this masterpiece was composed are known.

The dating of the Tolkappiyam is difficult, much debated, and it remains contested and uncertain. The tradition and some Indian scholars favor an early date for its composition, before the common era, and state that it is the work of one person associated with sage Agastya. Other Indian scholars, and non Indian scholars such as Kamil Zvelebil, prefer to date it not as a single entity but in parts or layers. Scholars reject traditional datings based on three sangams and the myth of great floods because there is no verifiable evidence in its favor, and the available evidence based on linguistics, epigraphy, Sangam literature and other Indian texts suggest a much later date. In post Independence India, the Tamil scholar Gift Siromoney states that the Tolkappiyam should be dated based on the chronology of TALBI P system based inscriptions, which is difficult to date. He suggests that this could be around the time of Ashoka, or centuries later. Iravatham Mahadevan dates the Tolkappiyam to no earlier than the 2nd century CE, as it mentions the puḷḷi being an integral part of Tamil script. The puḷḷi a diacritical mark to distinguish pure consonants from consonants with inherent vowels only became prevalent in Tamil epigraphs after the 2nd century CE. V. S. Rajam, a linguist specialised in Old Tamil, in her book A Reference Grammar of Classical Tamil Poetry dates it to pre fifth century CE. Vaiyapuri Pillai, the author of the Tamil lexicon, dated Tolkappiyam to not earlier than the 5th or 6th century CE. Kamil V. Zvelebil dates the earliest layer, the core Ur text of the Tolkappiyam to 150 BCE or later. In his 1974 review, Zvelebil places Book 1 and 2 of the Tolkappiyam in the 100 BCE to 250 CE period. Rest of the sections and sutras of the text to centuries between 3rd and 5th century CE. The extant manuscripts of Tolkappiyam are based on the "final redaction" of the 5th century, states Zvelebil. Takanobu Takahashi, a Japanese Indologist, states that the Tolkappiyam has several layers with the oldest dating to 1st or 2nd century CE, and the newest and the final redaction dating to the 5th or 6th century CE. A C Burnell, a 19th century Indologist who contributed to the study of Dravidian languages was of the view that the Tolkappiyam could not be dated to "much later than the eighth century." Herman Tieken, a Dutch scholar, states that the Tolkappiyam dates from the 9th century CE at the earliest. He arrives at this conclusion by treating the Tolkappiyam and the anthologies of Sangam literature as part of a 9th century Pandyan project to raise the prestige of Tamil as a classical language equal to Sanskrit, and assigning new dates to the traditionally accepted dates for a vast section of divergent literature (Sangam literature, post Sangam literature and Bhakti literature like Tevaram). Hermen Tieken's work has, however, been criticised on fundamental, methodological, and other grounds by G. E. Ferro Luzzi, George Hart and Anne Monius.