Abstract
This contribution,1 based on an examination of several Tamil dictionaries and Tamil grammars, composed in Portuguese and in Latin, by missionaries who were in Tamil Nadu during the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries, examines the lemmatization strategies which they followed, while dealing with Tamil verbal morphology. If nominal forms were not really a problem, verbal forms were more difficult to cope with. This is why for instance Proença’s dictionary is very far from being completely lemmatized, and many of the forms which modern lexicographers would consider as falling under the same head, are listed as separate entries, and given separate translations. The complexity of the morphology was progressively mastered by grammarians, using labels taken from Portuguese or Latin terminology, although they did not always agree between themselves, concerning for instance what should be called infinitivus, some of them introducing new labels such as infinitivus substantivus and infinitivus absolutus. The most difficult nut to crack, however, was probably the existence of diathetic pairs, consisting of two paired verbs, which some modern linguists have referred to as ‘affective’ and ‘effective’, additionally accompanied by some causatives.
Highlights
The early challenge of lemmatizing Tamil verbal forms, through categories used for Latin and Portuguese
Laboratoire d’Histoire des Théories Linguistiques (HTL, UMR 7597), CNRS – Université de Paris, FR jean-luc.chevillard@univ-paris-diderot.fr. This contribution,1 based on an examination of several Tamil dictionaries and Tamil grammars, composed in Portuguese and in Latin, by missionaries who were in Tamil Nadu during the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries, examines the lemmatization strategies which they followed, while dealing with Tamil verbal morphology
This article, which falls under the larger domain called History of Descriptive Linguistics and, inside that domain, concerns what Auroux (1994) calls grammatisation ‘grammatization’,2 concentrates mostly on some of the traces left by speakers of Portuguese who were trying in the 16th and in the 17th centuries, by writing grammars and compiling dictionaries —see the extracts from the Arte composed by Henrique Henriques [1520–1600] ( HH) and from the Vocabulario Tamulico Com a Significaçam Portugueza ( VTCSP) inside Figures 1 and 2— in order to fullfill their Missionary activities, to master a South Indian Language, which they referred to as malauar or as Tamul (see entries 342_L_j & 342_L_k in Figure 2, and see the transcription-translation provided in (1) & (2) below)
Summary
This article, which falls under the larger domain called History of Descriptive Linguistics and, inside that domain, concerns what Auroux (1994) calls grammatisation ‘grammatization’,2 concentrates mostly on some of the traces left by speakers of Portuguese who were trying in the 16th and in the 17th centuries, by writing grammars and compiling dictionaries —see the extracts from the Arte composed by Henrique Henriques [1520–1600] ( HH) and from the Vocabulario Tamulico Com a Significaçam Portugueza ( VTCSP) inside Figures 1 and 2— in order to fullfill their Missionary activities, to master a South Indian Language, which they referred to as malauar (see Figure 1) or as Tamul (see entries 342_L_j & 342_L_k in Figure 2, and see the transcription-translation provided in (1) & (2) below). This article, which falls under the larger domain called History of Descriptive Linguistics and, inside that domain, concerns what Auroux (1994) calls grammatisation ‘grammatization’,2 concentrates mostly on some of the traces left by speakers of Portuguese who were trying in the 16th and in the 17th centuries, by writing grammars and compiling dictionaries —see the extracts from the Arte composed by Henrique Henriques [1520–1600] ( HH) and from the Vocabulario Tamulico Com a Significaçam Portugueza ( VTCSP) inside Figures 1 and 2— in order to fullfill their Missionary activities, to master a South Indian Language, which they referred to as malauar (see Figure 1) or as Tamul (see entries 342_L_j & 342_L_k, and see the transcription-translation provided in (1) & (2) below) As those missionaries would progressively discover, the tamul language which they were trying to master —usually referred to in English as ‘Tamil’— turned out to be a symbiotic combination of three languages, difficult to separate in practice, because each component of the Tamil Triglossia (see Figure 3) had its own role to play in the global picture of the everyday life in Tamil Nadu, linguistically punctuated by solemn occasions, often religious. The capital letters T, P, L & E stand respectively for the Tamil, Portuguese, Latin & English languages, suitably extended in order to be usable as metalanguages for describing Tamil, noted here by the lower case letter t, in order to signify that it is the object-language in a description, which can be either a grammar, as in the case of the Arte attributed to HH, or a dictionary, as in the case of AP’s 1679 VTCSP
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