Clans of Tamilakam (Tamil Nadu)

The limits of Tamilakam were from Venkata Hill in the North, to Cape Comorin in the South, and from the Bay of Bengal in the East, to the Arabian Sea in the West. Malayalam had not formed into a separate dialect at this period, and only one language, Tamil, was spoken from the Eastern to the Western Sea.

Villavar - Bowmen (Dravidian word vil meaning a bow)

Minavar - Fishermen (from the Dravidian meen, a fish)

Vadukar tribe - Lived north of Venkatam

Karaiyar (Parathavar, Naga tribe) - Eastern coast extending from Cape Cumari who subsisted by fishing

Veduvar (Vedar) - Capital of this province was Nagai or Naga-paddinam

Aruvalar (Kurumbar) - A nomadic tribe

Vellala tribe - Chola king Karikalan, who first settle the aruvalar wandering tribes

Nagas - Very numerous and civilized race (Arjuna married first Ulipi, the daughter of a Naga king)

Maravar (Naga tribe) - Most powerful and warlike tribe

Kallar (Einar Naga tribe) - Descendants of Eyinar, most lawless of Naga tribes

Maarar - Chief of this tribe was ever afterwards knows as Palayan or 'the ancient' being the most ancient, of the Tamil settlers in the southern part of India

Maranmar tribe (Pandiya Kingdom) - Conquered Burmah before the first century A.D (known as Maramma-desa)

Thirayar tribe (Chola Kingdom) - Sea Kings

Vanavar (Celestials, Chera Kingdom) - Natives of mountainous region in the North of Bengal. The Chera kings belonged to this tribe and called themselves Vanavar

Kosar (Koshans) - Leaders of the four tribes of Yuh-chi (Asioi, Pasianoi, Tocharoi and Sakarauloi)

As the Tamil immigrants came into Southern India at distant intervals of time and in separate tribes, and were fewer in number than the aboriginal Nagas and Dravidians, they had to adopt the ancient Dravidian language, and in course of time, they modified and refined it into the language known as Tamil.

The peculiar letter Rzha found in the Tamil alphabet which does not occur in the other Dravidian or Sanskrit languages, was doubtless brought in by the Tamil immigrants. This letter occurs only in some of the Thibetian languages. It indicates most clearly that the primitive home of the Tamil immigrants must have been in the Thibetian pleatu.

Citation

The Tamils eighteen hundred (1800) years ago

By V. Kanakasabhai

Harvard College Library - Published by Higginbotham & Co

Sumerian is Archaic Tamil / the Tamil of First CaGkam

Central to my various claims about the Dravidian past remains my identification of Sumerian as Archaic Tamil, a fossil of the past of Tamil Language, a fossil in the sense of Aurobindo’s Evolutionary linguistics. Languages evolve in various ways and it happens that Tamil language has evolved over the last 5000 years at least throwing on the way many fossils of which we have abundance of such fossils in Sumeria (4000 BC to 1000 BC) and from about 300 BC to 300 AD in CaGkam classics and so forth. There is a gap perhaps from about 2000 BC to about 500 BC that needs to be filled up.

Dr K.Loganathan

http://arutkural.tripod.com/sumstudies/sum-as-arch-tamil.htm

Affinity of Indus texts with Dravidian language Tamil

There has been considerable debate regarding whether the Indus texts have affinity with the Dravidian languages (such as Tamil), Indo-European languages (such as Sanskrit), or some other language family. A frequently cited argument in favor of the Dravidian hypothesis is that the Indus texts appear to be agglutinative in their morphological structure: sign sequences often have the same initial signs but different final signs (ranging from 1 to 3 signs).Such modification of morphemes by a system of suffixes is found in Dravidian languages but is rare in Indo-European languages (such as Sanskrit) which tend to be inflectional (changing the final sound of a word rather than adding suffixes). Our result that the conditional entropy(measure of the loss of information in a transmitted signal or message) of the Indus texts is closest to Old Tamil, a Dravidian language, among the datasets we considered is suggestive in this regard. However, this result is also tied to our use of an alpha-syllabic script to represent the Sangam era Tamil texts.

Citation

Entropic Evidence for Linguistic Structure in the Indus Script

Rajesh P. N. Rao, Nisha Yadav,Mayank N. Vahia,Hrishikesh Joglekar,R. Adhikari, Iravatham Mahadevan

Tamil the language of Dravidians

The extensive excavations carried out at the two principal city sites, Harappa nd Mohenjo-Daro, both situated in the Indus basin, indicates that this Dravidian culture was well established by about 2500 B.C., and subsequent discoveries have revealed that it covered most of the Lower Indus Valley. What we know of this ancient civilization is derived almost exclusively from archaeological data since every attempt to decipher the script u sed by these people has failed so far. Recent analyses of the order of the signs on the inscriptions have led several scholars to the view that the language is not of the Indo-European family, nor is it close to the Sumerians, Hurrians, or Elamite, nor can it be related to the structure of the Munda languages of modern India. If it is related to any modern language family it appears to be Dravidian akin to Old Tamil, presently spoken throughout the southern part of the Indian Peninsula.

Citation

"The Development of Civilization and Religion in India and its Influence on the World Society"

Dr. Alexander Harris

Vedas compiled and worte by Dravidians

The bibliographical evidences indicate that the Vedas are written in the Grantha and Nagari scripts, and according to tradition Veda Vyasa, a Dravidian, compiled and wrote the Vedas. The Grantha script belongs to the southern group of scripts and Veda Vyasa being a Dravidian would certainly have used it.

Citation

"The Development of Civilization and Religion in India and its Influence on the World Society"

Dr. Alexander Harris

Tamil browser - Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox

Its nice to see the internationalization of the browsers Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox. I have tried firefox tamil and its good. Thumbs up to Google and Mozilla. This is one reason for the tamils in the rural areas to start using computers and the flow of information could help them educate and reap the benifits with the knowledge they gain out of it.

Awesome job Google and Mozilla !!!

Iam looking forward to see Google Search in Tamil .

Google Chrome Tamil

http://www.google.com/chrome/index.html?hl=ta&brand=CHMB&utm_campaign=en&utm_source=en-ha-na-us-sk&utm_medium=ha

Mozilla Firefox Tamil

Download

Origin of the word "Tamil"

The English word Dravidian was first employed by Robert Caldwell in his book of comparative Dravidian grammar based on the usage of the Sanskrit word "IAST|drāviḍa" in the work "Tantravārttika" by IAST|Kumārila Bhaṭṭa (Zvelebil 1990:xx). As for the origin of the Sanskrit word "IAST|drāviḍa" itself there have been various theories proposed. Basically the theories are about the direction of derivation between "IAST|tamiẓ" and "IAST|drāviḍa".

There is no definite philological and linguistic basis for asserting unilaterally that the name "Dravida" also forms the origin of the word "Tamil" (Dravida -> Dramila -> Tamizha or Tamil). Zvelebil cites the forms such as "dramila" (in IAST|Daṇḍin's Sanskrit work "Avanisundarīkathā") "IAST|damiḷa" (found in Ceylonese chronicle Mahavamsa) and then goes on to say (ibid. page xxi): "The forms "damiḷa"/"damila" almost certainly provide a connection of "IAST|dr(a/ā)viḍa" " and "... "IAST|tamiḷ" < "IAST|tamiẓ" ...whereby the further development might have been *"IAST|tamiẓ" > *"IAST|damiḷ" > "IAST|damiḷa"- / "damila"- and further, with the intrusive, 'hypercorrect' (or perhaps analogical) -"r"-, into "IAST|dr(a/ā)viḍa". The -"m"-/-"v"- alternation is a common enough phenomenon in Dravidian phonology" (Zvelebil 1990:xxi)Zvelebil in his earlier treatise (Zvelebil 1975: p53) states: "It is obvious that the Sanskrit "IAST|dr(a/ā)viḍa", Pali "damila", "IAST|damiḷo" and Prakrit "IAST|d(a/ā)viḍa" are all etymologically connected with "IAST|tamiẓ" and further remarks "The "r" in "IAST|tamiẓ" > "IAST|dr(a/ā)viḍa" is a hypercorrect insertion, cf. an analogical case of DED 1033 Ta. "kamuku", Tu."kangu" "areca nut": Skt. "kramu(ka)".".

Further, another eminent Dravidian linguist Bhadriraju Krishnamurti in his book "Dravidian Languages" (Krishnamurti 2003: p. 2, footnote 2) states:"Joseph (1989: IJDL 18.2:134-42) gives extensive references to the use of the term "IAST|draviḍa", "dramila" first as the name of a people, then of a country. Sinhala inscriptions of BCE [Before Christian Era] cite "IAST|dameḍa"-, "damela"- denoting Tamil merchants. Early Buddhist and Jaina sources used "IAST|damiḷa"- to refer to a people of south India (presumably Tamil); "IAST|damilaraṭṭha"- was a southern non-Aryan country; "IAST|dramiḷa"-, "IAST|dramiḍa", and "IAST|draviḍa"- were used as variants to designate a country in the south ("IAST|Bṛhatsamhita-", "Kādambarī", "Daśakumāracarita-", fourth to seventh centuries CE) (1989: 134-8). It appears that "IAST|damiḷa"- was older than "IAST|draviḍa"- which could be its Sanskritization."

Based on what Krishnamurti states referring to a scholarly paper published in the International Journal of Dravidian Linguistics, the Sanskrit word "IAST|draviḍa" itself is later than "IAST|damiḷa" since the dates for the forms with -r- are centuries later than the dates for the forms without -r- ("IAST|damiḷa", "IAST|dameḍa"-, "damela"- etc.). So it is clear that it is difficult to maintain Dravida -> Dramila -> Tamizha or Tamil.

The Monier-Williams Sanskrit Dictionary [ [http://webapps.uni-koeln.de/tamil/ Sanskrit, Tamil and Pahlavi Dictionaries ] ] lists for the Sanskrit word "draviUnicode|ḍa" a meaning of "collective Name for 5 peoples, viz. the Āndhras, KarUnicode|ṇāUnicode|ṭakas, Gurjaras, TailaUnicode|ṅgas, and MahārāUnicode|ṣṭras".