தமிழ் சங்கதத்தில் [சமஸ்கிருதம்] இருந்து வந்தது அல்ல

என்னுடைய அலுவலகதிதிலும், பெங்களூரிலிம் உள்ள சில வடக்கிந்திய, [சில தென்னிந்தியர்களும், சில தமிழர்களும்(!?#*)] நண்பர்கள், உலகில் தோன்றிய முதல் மொழி சங்கதம்[sanskrit] என்று வற்ட்டுத் தனமாய் வாதாடுவார்கள். அவர்களின் இத்தகைய மூட நம்பிக்கைகளை உடைப்பதற்காகவே நான் மொழியியல் பற்றி படிக்க ஆரம்பித்தேன்[ஒரு வகையில் அவர்களுக்கு நான் நன்றிக்கடன் பட்டுள்ளேன் :)].

இதில் கொடுமை என்னவென்றால் இவர்களிடம் ஆதாரம் கேட்டால் இராமாயணத்தையும், மகா பாரததையும் துணக்கு இழுப்பார்கள்.இவை இரண்டுக்கும் ஆதாரம் கேட்டால் வேரு ஏதாவது இதிகாசங்களை[இல்லாத காசங்களை] துணைக்கு அழைப்பார்கள்.

இத்தகைய வாதங்களில் இருந்து நான் தெரிந்து கொன்டது ஒன்றே ஒன்றுதான். விவாதங்களினால் இவர்களை பெரும்பாலும் மாற்ற முடியாது, இவர்கள் ஒரு வகையில் மாற விரும்பாதவர்கள் ம்ற்றும் ஒரு முன் முடிவுடனே விவாததி தொடங்குவார்கள். இவர்களுடன் ஆவி போக பேசுவதற்கு பதில் சில சுட்டிகளை[URL] கொடுத்து ஒதுங்கி விடுவேன். அத்தகைய சுட்டிகளை ஓரிடத்தில் தொகுத்தால் என்க்கும், பிற தமிழர்வம் உள்ள நண்பர்களுக்கும் உதவும் இன்பதால் இங்கே பதிகிறேன்

clipped from tamil.berkeley.edu

I have been a Professor of Tamil at the University of California, Berkeley, since 1975 and am currently holder of the Tamil Chair at that institution. My degree, which I received in 1970, is in Sanskrit, from Harvard, and my first employment was as a Sanskrit professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in 1969

Besides Tamil and Sanskrit, I know the classical languages of Latin and Greek and have read extensively in their literatures in the original. I am also well-acquainted with comparative linguistics and the literatures of modern Europe (I know Russian, German, and French and have read extensively in those languages)

I have spent many years -- most of my life (since 1963) -- studying Sanskrit. I have read in the original all of Kalidasa, Magha, and parts of Bharavi and Sri Harsa. I have also read in the original the fifth book of the Rig Veda as well as many other sections, many of the Upanisads, most of the Mahabharata, the Kathasaritsagara, Adi Sankara’s works, and many other works in Sanskrit.

I say this not because I wish to show my erudition, but rather to establish my fitness for judging whether a literature is classical. Let me state unequivocally that, by any criteria one may choose, Tamil is one of the great classical literatures and traditions of the world.

First, Tamil is of considerable antiquity. It predates the literatures of other modern Indian languages by more than a thousand years. Its oldest work, the Tolkappiyam,, contains parts that, judging from the earliest Tamil inscriptions, date back to about 200 BCE. The greatest works of ancient Tamil, the Sangam anthologies and the Pattuppattu, date to the first two centuries of the current era. They are the first great secular body of poetry written in India, predating Kalidasa's works by two hundred years.

Second, Tamil constitutes the only literary tradition indigenous to India that is not derived from Sanskrit. Indeed, its literature arose before the influence of Sanskrit in the South became strong and so is qualitatively different from anything we have in Sanskrit or other Indian languages. It has its own poetic theory, its own grammatical tradition, its own esthetics, and, above all, a large body of literature that is quite unique. It shows a sort of Indian sensibility that is quite different from anything in Sanskrit or other Indian languages, and it contains its own extremely rich and vast intellectual tradition.

Third, the quality of classical Tamil literature is such that it is fit to stand beside the great literatures of Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Chinese, Persian and Arabic. The subtlety and profundity of its works, their varied scope (Tamil is the only premodern Indian literature to treat the subaltern extensively), and their universality qualify Tamil to stand as one of the great classical traditions and literatures of the world. Everyone knows the Tirukkural, one of the world's greatest works on ethics; but this is merely one of a myriad of major and extremely varied works that comprise the Tamil classical tradition. There is not a facet of human existence that is not explored and illuminated by this great literature.

Finally, Tamil is one of the primary independent sources of modern Indian culture and tradition. I have written extensively on the influence of a Southern tradition on the Sanskrit poetic tradition. But equally important, the great sacred works of Tamil Hinduism, beginning with the Sangam Anthologies, have undergirded the development of modern Hinduism. Their ideas were taken into the Bhagavata Purana and other texts (in Telugu and Kannada as well as Sanskrit), whence they spread all over India. Tamil has its own works that are considered to be as sacred as the Vedas and that are recited alongside Vedic mantras in the great Vaisnava temples of South India (such as Tirupati). And just as Sanskrit is the source of the modern Indo-Aryan languages, classical Tamil is the source language of modern Tamil and Malayalam. As Sanskrit is the most conservative and least changed of the Indo-Aryan languages, Tamil is the most conservative of the Dravidian languages, the touchstone that linguists must consult to understand the nature and development of Dravidian.

To deny that Tamil is a classical language is to deny a vital and central part of the greatness and richness of Indian culture.

In trying to discern why Tamil has not been recognized as a classical language, I can see only a political reason: there is a fear that if Tamil is selected as a classical language, other Indian languages may claim similar status. This is an unnecessary worry

clipped from
en.wikipedia.org

Basically, Dravidian languages show extensive
lexical (vocabulary) borrowing, but only a few traits of structural (either
phonological or grammatical) borrowing, from the Indo-Aryan tongues. On the
other hand, Indo-Aryan shows rather large-scale structural borrowing from
Dravidian, but relatively few loanwords.^[2]

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 Daṇḍin's Sanskrit work Avanisundarīkathā)
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 dr(a/ā)viḍa " and "... tamiḷ < tamiẓ ...whereby the further development might
have been *tamiẓ > *damiḷ > damiḷa- / damila- and further, with the
intrusive, 'hypercorrect' (or perhaps analogical) -r-, into 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 dr(a/ā)viḍa, Pali damila, damiḷo and Prakrit d(a/ā)viḍa are all etymologically connected with
tamiẓ" and further remarks "The r in
tamiẓ > dr(a/ā)viḍa is a hypercorrect insertion, cf. an
analogical case of DED 1033 Ta. kamuku, Tu.kangu "areca nut": Skt.
kramu(ka).".

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

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 draviḍa, dramila first as the name of a
people, then of a country. Sinhala inscriptions of BCE [Before Christian Era]
cite dameḍa-, damela- denoting Tamil merchants.
Early Buddhist and Jaina sources used damiḷa- to refer to a people of south India
(presumably Tamil); damilaraṭṭha- was a southern non-Aryan country;
dramiḷa-, dramiḍa, and draviḍa- were used as variants to designate a
country in the south (Bṛhatsamhita-, Kādambarī,
Daśakumāracarita-, fourth to seventh centuries CE) (1989: 134-8). It
appears that damiḷa- was older than draviḍa- which could be its
Sanskritization."

The Dravidian languages have remained an isolated
family to the present day and have defied all of the attempts to show a
connection with the Indo-European tongues, Mitanni, Basque, Sumerian, or Korean.
The most promising and plausible hypothesis is that of a linguistic relationship
with the Uralic (Hungarian, Finnish) and Altaic (Turkish, Mongol) language
groups^[5].

Robert Caldwell
published his Comparative grammar of the Dravidian or South-Indian family of
languages, which considerably expanded the Dravidian umbrella and
established it as one of the major language groups of the world. Caldwell coined
the term "Dravidian" from the Sanskrit drāvida, which
was used in a 7th century text to refer to the Tamil language of the
south of India.

Dravidian and Sanskrit have influenced each other in various ways. Some
earlier views in this interrelationship tended to view it as one-way from
Sanskrit to Dravidian as evidenced in the following statements: "While the
origins and initial development of Dravidian languages was independent of
Sanskrit,^[25] during later centuries, however, Dravidian
languages like Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil and Telugu have been greatly
influenced by Sanskrit in terms of
vocabulary, grammar and literary styles.^[26]"

Though the dominance of Sanskrit was exaggerated
in some Brahmanic circles of Tamilnadu, and Tamil was given unduly
underestimated by a few Sanskrit-oriented scholars, the Tamil and Sanskrit
cultures were not generally in rivalry".

However more recent research has shown that Sanskrit has been influenced in
certain more fundamental ways than Dravidian languages have been by it: It is by
way of phonology^[27] and even more
significantly here via grammatical constructs. This has been the case from the
earliest language available (ca. 1200 B.C.) of Sanskrit: the Ṛg Vedic speech.

Basically, Dravidian languages show extensive lexical (vocabulary) borrowing,
but only a few traits of structural (either phonological or grammatical)
borrowing, from the Indo-Aryan tongues. On the other hand, Indo-Aryan shows
rather large-scale structural borrowing from Dravidian, but relatively few
loanwords.^[2]

A more serious influence on Vedic Sanskrit is the extensive grammatical
influence attested by the usage of the quotative marker iti and the
occurrence of gerunds of verbs, a grammatical feature not found even in the
Avestan language, a sister language of the Vedic Sanskrit. As Krishnamurti
states: "Besides, the Ṛg Veda has used the gerund, not found in Avestan,
with the same grammatical function as in Dravidian, as a non-finite verb for
'incomplete' action. Ṛg Vedic language also attests the use of iti as a
quotative clause complementizer. All these features are not a consequence of
simple borrowing but they indicate substratum influence (Kuiper 1991: ch
2)".

The Brahui population of Balochistan has been taken
by some as the linguistic equivalent of a relict population, perhaps
indicating that Dravidian languages were
formerly much more widespread and were supplanted by the incoming Indo-Aryan
languages.^[28]