Continuing the review of Passions of the Tongue

Sudalaimuthu Palaniappan Palaniappa at AOL.COM
Tue Sep 14 03:17:08 UTC 1999


Ramaswamy says:

<
 as a Brahman wanting to learn Tamil in the aftermath of a powerful 
anti-Brahman movement in the state, I did not expect my interest in the 
language or its history would be welcomed in its putative home, Tamilnadu... 
I finally formally learned the language, this troubled "mother tongue" of 
mine in a land far away from both my home and my mother.> p. xxi-xxii

When Ramaswamy learnt Tamil at Penn, did she study it using the grammatical 
terms such as vERRumai, iTaiccol, etc.? Students do in Tamilnadu. But that is 
not the way it is taught in USA where the language background is different. 
Based on References  given by Ramaswamy, one can see that Fabian 1986 deals 
with Swahili in Belgian Congo, and Rafael 1988 deals with Tagalog.  It is not 
clear what language Cohn 1985 is addressing. In any case, how can their 
conclusions be transferred to the Tamil situation? 

For languages without a long tradition of grammatical analysis, the grammars 
of the missionaries may have been of significance. Not for Tamil. No Tamil 
student in any traditional Tamil area learns Tamil using a missionary 
grammar. Then, why should Tamils criticize how the missionaries chose to 
teach non-Tamils in what was, in the view of  the missionaries, the most 
efficient way to teach? But, grammars written by Tamils for use by Tamils, 
when they describe Tamil using mainly  Sanskrit terminology, have been 
justifiably criticized. Such a criticism did not unfairly target brahmins. 
For instance, civaJAn2a mun2ivar of 18th century, a non-brahmin scholar in 
Tamil and Sanskrit, "opposed the overbearing enthusiasm of Sanskritists like 
Swaminatha Desikar, Vaidyanatha Desikar, and Subrahmanya Ditshitar" (Tamil 
Literature  by K. Zvelebil, Wiesbaden, 1974, p. 190). Of these, the Desikars 
were non-brahmins and the Dikshitar was a brahmin. As Rajam Ramamurti said in 
1983, "When Sanskrit terms are used to describe Tamil, the first and the 
foremost distortion that happens on the Tamil side is the total negligence of 
the descriptive nature of Tamil grammatical terminology. Tamil grammatical 
terminology is semantically motivated in the sense that the terms are 
self-explanatory of the concepts they signify" (See "What happens When 
Foreign Grammatical Terms are used to Describe an Indigenous Language?: A 
South Dravidian Situation," IJDL, Vol. 12, no. 2, p. 335-344) 

Regards
S.Palaniappan





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