TAMIL Full Form | Full Form of TAMIL
Tamil Full Form
Tamil
- Tamil is a Dravidian language natively spoken by the Tamil people of South Asia. Tamil is that the official language of the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, also as two sovereign nations, Singapore and Sri Lanka.
- In India, it's also the official language of the Union Territory of Pondicherry. Tamil is spoken by significant minorities within the four other South Indian states of Kerala, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana and therefore the Union Territory of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands.
- It’s also spoken by the Tamil diaspora found in many countries, including Malaysia, South Africa, UK, US, Canada, and Australia. Tamil is additionally natively spoken by Sri Lankan Moors.
- One of 22 scheduled languages in the Constitution of India, Tamil was the first to be classified as a classical language of India and is one of the longest-surviving classical languages within the world. A. K. Ramanujan described it as "the only language of up to date India which is recognizably continuous with a classical past." The variety and quality of classical Tamil literature has led to it being described as "one of the good classical traditions and literatures of the world".
- A recorded Tamil literature has been documented for over 2000 years. The earliest period of Tamil literature, Sangam literature, is dated from ca. 300 BC - AD 300. It's the oldest extant literature among Dravidian languages.
- The earliest epigraphic records found on rock edicts and 'hero stones' go back around the 3rd century BC.
- More than 55% of the epigraphically inscriptions (about 55,000) found by the Archaeological Survey of India are within the Tamil language. Tamil language inscriptions written in Brahmi script are discovered in Sri Lanka and on commodity in Thailand and Egypt.
- The 2 earliest manuscripts from India, acknowledged and registered by the UNESCO Memory of the world register in 1997 and 2005, were written in Tamil.
- In 1578, Portuguese Christian missionaries published a Tamil prayer book in old Tamil script named Thambiran Vanakkam, thus making Tamil the first Indian language to be printed and published.
- The Tamil Lexicon, published by the University of Madras, was one among the earliest dictionaries published within the Indian languages.
- According to a 2001 survey, there have been 1,863 newspapers published in Tamil, of which 353 were dailies.
History
- According to linguists like Bhadriraju Krishnamurti, Tamil, as a Dravidian, descends from Proto-Dravidian, a proto-language. Linguistic reconstruction suggests that Proto-Dravidian was spoken around the third millennium BC, possibly within the region around the lower Godavari river basin in peninsular India.
- The material evidence suggests that the speakers of Proto-Dravidian were of the culture related to the Neolithic complexes of South India.
- The earliest epigraphic attestations of Tamil are generally taken to have been written from the 2nd century BC.
- Among Indian languages, Tamil has the most ancient non-Sanskrit Indian literature. Scholars categories the attested history of the language into three periods: Old Tamil (300 BC-AD 700), Middle Tamil (700-1600) and Modern Tamil (1600-present).
- In November 2007, an excavation at Quseir-al-Qadim revealed Egyptian pottery dating back to first century BC with ancient Tamil Brahmin inscriptions John Guy states that Tamil was the lingua franca for early maritime traders from India.