Tamil Literature from Sangam to Modern Period - What does a search of the Tamil Electronic data reveal?

Volume 2, Issue 03 | July 2022 - September 2022

Prof. Dr. Vasu Renganathan

University of Pennsylvania, United States

Vasu, Renganathan 2022. “Tamil Literature from Sangam to Modern Period - What does a search of the Tamil Electronic data reveal?”. Dravida Pozhil – Journal of Dravidian Studies 2 (3):09-14.

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A systematic study of the Tamil language from Sangam to Modern period from a historical perspective may reveal that there does exist a continuum of changes that occurred from one stage to another in Tamil language. Without such a study, any synchronic description of Tamil would only reflect its complexity in an overwhelming way. In other words, The Tamil language, the way it is now with a museum of complex forms, expressions and grammatical constructions, both in written and spoken variety, demonstrates a vast number of linguistic characteristics at phonological, morphological and syntactic levels, that require a comprehensive diachronic study to fully understand them in a coherence way. In this respect an extensive electronic database of Tamil texts from all of the stages along with a powerful query tool to search texts from various dimensions is indispensable. This paper is an attempt to illustrate how such an electronic database for Tamil can be used extensively to study some of the morphological and syntactic behaviors of Tamil from a historical point of view.

Prof. Dr. Vasu Renganathan, University of Pennsylvania, United States

Dr. Vasu Renganathan has been teaching Tamil language and literature at the University of Pennsylvania, USA since 1996. He earned his Masters from the University of Washington, Seattle and Ph.D. in medieval Tamil language and literature from the University of Pennsylvania. He also has another Ph.D. in linguistics from the Annamalai University, India.

Dr. Renganathan began his teaching career in 1989 and previously taught at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and the University of Washington, Seattle. In addition to teaching, he has also worked on various curriculum and instructional material development projects. Vasu also served as the Chairman of the International Forum For Informational Technology In Tamil (INFITT) and currently serving as one of the Executive Committee members of the South Asian Language Teachers Association (SALTA). Vasu is also in the International Advisory Board member for the Electronic Journal of Foreign Language Teaching, (e-FLT), Singapore.

His research interests include: History of Tamil language and literature, History of the Tamil Religious developments from medieval period, Language of Sangam Tamil literature and Tamil inscriptions, Teaching and learning of Tamil language and Impact of Technology in the pedagogical methods. Some of his Publications include: Tamil Language in Context: A comprehensive approach to learning Tamil and An English Dictionary of Tamil Verb (Associate Editor).

bibliography

Baskaran Sankaran, Kalika Bali, Monojit Choudhury, Tanmoy Bhattacharya, Pushpak Bhattacharyya, Girish Nath Jha, S. Rajendran, K. Saravanan, L. Sobha, and K. V. Subbarao, A Common Parts-of-Speech Tagset Framework for Indian Languages, Proceedings of LREC 2008.
Murugaiyan, A (2004) Note sur les prédications expérientielles en tamoul classique, Bulletin de la Société de Linguistique de Paris, 99, p. 363-382.
Renganathan, Vasu. (2010). The Language of Tirumūlar’s Tirumantiram, A Medieval Saiva Tamil Religious Text. Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.
Renganathan, Vasu. (2001). Development of Morphological Tagger for Tamil, INFITT Conference, Kuala Lumpur.