Talk:Tamil grammar

indefinite article

Tamil has an indefinite article but no definite article. 'Oru' as the indefinite article in Tamil is just as valid as 'un' as the indefinite article in French. Beojan (talk) 20:19, 3 May 2008 (UTC)

porul

porul division in Tamil is not dealing with the meaning of the words. It deals with the life-style of the Tamils. The 9 sub-divisions in 'porul' chapter deal as follows.1. personal-life, 2. common-life, 3. life before marriage, 4. life after marriage, 5. social life, 6. emotions of the peoples, 7. modes of comparison, 8. prosody and 9. convention of language. Hence I made a correction. --Sengai Podhuvan (talk) 20:49, 4 May 2012 (UTC)

So, nothing to do with what in English we understand by "grammar"? —Tamfang (talk) 01:05, 10 November 2012 (UTC)

As far as I can tell, it has about as much place in a discussion of Tamil grammar as a discussion of Kabbalah has in a discussion of Hebrew grammar. —Twice Nothing (talk) 01:56, 9 January 2015 (UTC)

Merge discussion

Porul ilakkanam was discussed for deletion at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Porul ilakkanam on 30 September 2012. The result of that discussion was a decision to keep the article, not to delete it.

In the course of the discussion, two editors (one being me) suggested merging Porul ilakkanam and a third mentioned the possibility of merging, while two others argued against such merger. As the current Porul ilakkanam page is quite short, I would like to re-open the merger discussion.

At Articles for deletion, I (User:Cnilep) suggesting merging with Tolkāppiyam, since the only sources I could find in English were books or articles on Tamil literature, most mentioning Tolkāppiyam. User:SpacemanSpiff suggested, "This shouldn't be merged to Tolkappiyam, this is one topic that is addressed by the book." User:Anbu121 agreed with SpacemanSpiff, "I too agree that merge is not logical by virtue of nature of the subject."

User:Squeamish Ossifrage suggested, "the merge target should be Tamil grammar, which briefly mentions the "five parts" of Tamil grammar but is desperate for some expansion and context there." User:Batard0 suggested, "I don't think anyone disputes that this is one of the five parts of Tamil grammar; I, at least, don't doubt that that's the case. Naturally, this will be covered extensively in Tamil grammar books, which will almost uniformly have to be in Tamil." The same user later added, "Perhaps a separate article is warranted because of the uniqueness of this grammatical concept as compared to English-language concepts, or perhaps it fits better in the Tamil grammar article."

The current suggestion is that Porul ilakkanam be merged to Tamil grammar. All opinions are welcome. Cnilep (talk) 04:11, 25 October 2012 (UTC)

It is a reasonable idea to merge the very short article Porul ilakkanam into this article. --DThomsen8 (talk) 12:12, 25 October 2012 (UTC)

I supported this at AFD, and I support it now. In general, the "Parts of Tamil grammar" section needs expansion with some reliably sourced material. The basic gist of the topic is that these aren't parts of speech or elements of grammar (like "participle" or something), but are sort of philosophical divisions of grammar components (letter, word, meaning, prosody, symbolism ... more or less), with a very long history. They're almost assuredly worth having information about, but very unlikely to be worth having standalone articles about. And the current contents of Porul ilakkanam, which are very short and not particularly clear, certainly aren't standing on their own merits. Squeamish Ossifrage (talk) 21:15, 25 October 2012 (UTC)

 Done Cnilep (talk) 01:01, 10 November 2012 (UTC)

It's been over two years and no one's come up with any better sources. (The one source that was provided sent me RealMedia files as soon as I visited it.) It looks to me like this is less "early Tamil literary theory" and more "mysticism on the part of early Tamil grammarians", anyway. If those cited sources were a little clearer, I might have added something like "Historically, Tamil grammarians also studied prosody and symbolism, which were not considered separate from grammar," but that's an inference on my part rather than a statement by the text. As it is, I've removed this section entirely. —Twice Nothing (talk) 01:56, 9 January 2015 (UTC)

Example section overhaul

The example passage is currently an image rather than actual text, which can be easily remedied and formatted more clearly. If the text is from an existing source, then that source should probably be cited (but otherwise, no bother). Using the ITRANS system to transliterate the passage is acceptable of course, but ISO 15919 is much more commonly used for Tamil transcription when Unicode characters are available (when a system cannot render UTF-8 characters, I see that it makes sense to use ASCII, so it makes sense to keep ITRANS if it is desired; but it is much less common). In addition to the transcription, the approach to the translation and the table underneath is unexpected and rather nonstandard.

In order to clarify translations, it is common to use interlinear glosses, with conventional glossing abbreviations. This will allow for much more effective explanation of each morpheme in the text. There is simple guide to this on the template page. Between the links I just gave in this paragraph, it should hopefully be possible for someone to do away with the clunky table. It is, of course, always permissible to have notes below the text's gloss if information is not clear in the gloss, but having an entire note to say that Tamil uses sandhi, rather than adding a section on sandhi on the phonology page and linking there after making a short note of it. But, for example, saying that one thing indicates the locative case is exactly why we use glossing.

I apologize for not doing this myself—I do not speak Tamil, nor do I have the bandwidth to go through a grammar and dictionary to find all the appropriate glosses.

Determinerteeth (talk) 21:20, 7 November 2020 (UTC)

This page should be based off of spoken tamil, not literary tamil

references such as Schiffman may be used SourceIsOpen (talk) 04:13, 14 December 2020 (UTC)

Why? Both seems encyclopædia-worthy. Pathawi (talk) 12:56, 5 August 2022 (UTC)

Reworking the Article

I hope you all are well. I stopped by to look at the list of verb classes, but got caught up in some issues with the article. I have some proposals for reworking the article in stages. The first of these is, I think, uncontroversial, so I'm just going to get into it. The others are a bit bigger, so I thought I'd open things up for discussion before making serious changes:

1. The Romanisation should be consistent throughout, and should match Wikipedia's in-house transliteration. I'm just going to get started on this, as it's following an overall Wikipedia guideline.
2. The grammar should probably consistently reflect the work of modern linguistics, with comparative reference to classical Tamil grammatical works. There's quite a bit of jumping back and forth right now. I'd like to work through a couple modern grammars to make this consistent (and, I hope, richer) throughout the article without eliminating any of the content citing Tolkāppiyam &c, tho perhaps abbreviating it some.
3. This article does not clearly distinguish what variety of Tamil it's describing. In fact, the content is almost entirely descriptive of literary Tamil, but the references are mixed. It would be good to start by being clear that this article is about literary Tamil as that's the current fact. However, once the above step is completed, I think it would be good to either: a) add comparison with modern spoken Tamil thruout; or, b) rename this article & create a parallel article on the grammar of modern colloquial Tamil (or Tamils—I'm not sure whether or not there are good sources on the colloquial Tamil of Sri Lanka).

Since these latter two would be substantive changes to the article, I didn't want to begin effecting them without discussion. Pathawi (talk) 13:18, 5 August 2022 (UTC)

Done with the first part. Pathawi (talk) 00:17, 18 August 2022 (UTC)

Transliteration

I have been undertaking the standardisation of the transliteration thruout as I mentioned in the previous section, and have been doing so in keeping with Wikipedia:Indic transliteration. There's one thing that I feel a little iffy about that the Indic transliteration guideline doesn't mention: Phonologically, for historically Tamil words, there's no underlying difference for voiced & unvoiced plosives. Thus, க் is realised as [k] or [g] (or [h]) depending entirely on environment. The page for the Indic transliteration gives both ‹k› and ‹g› as transliterations for க, which reflects this allophonic variation. It feels right to me to represent பொங்கல் as ‹poṅgal› rather than ‹poṅkal›. However, the practice on this page as well as on Tamil language seems mostly to be to always represent plosives as their unvoiced versions. I have stuck with that, as it is phonemically consistent. Anyone else have thoughts about this? (Regardless, some explanation begins in a phonology section of the grammar.) Pathawi (talk) 11:05, 6 August 2022 (UTC)

Oblique?

Twice the text here refers to oblique, namely oblique stems and oblique pronouns, without explaining what they are. It reads as if important information is missing, for instance how to form oblique stems, or the declension of pronouns, that is referred back to in the text. Otherwise part of the article is incomprehensible for people reading it. Merijn2 (talk) 20:50, 15 September 2022 (UTC)

Only three tenses?

Tamil has other tenses as well, not just the simple three. For example, it the present, past, and future perfects. AchyuthaVM (talk) 03:37, 1 February 2025 (UTC)

Misuse of term grammatical gender

The article states that Tamil has grammatical gender, but gives an example of verb conjugation based on a subject's gender. That is not what grammatical gender is. Grammatical gender is gendering nouns (such as having a word for a male and female dog). The section should be changed. thetechie@enwiki (she/they | talk) 21:29, 27 October 2025 (UTC)

I don't see why it should. Grammatical gender is not cross-linguistically determined by social gender, but it is in fact the case that some languages have a three-gender system in which grammatical gender corresponds to social gender. Tamil is among these. The World Atlas of Language Structures refers to this as a sex-based gender system, where Tamil is cited as an example. The classic Language Typology and Syntactic Description explicitly notes that gender 'classification may correspond to a real-world distinction of sex' (tho it usually does not!) (vol. II, 241). Agreement is the primary criterion for gender, so conjugation shouldn't be a problem. Am I misunderstanding your objection? Pathawi (talk) 05:02, 28 October 2025 (UTC)

In hindsight, I think you're at least somewhat right. I just remembered that some nouns, e.g. நண்பன் vs நண்பி are gendered, but in less amounts than another languages that have grammatical gender (e.g. Spanish, in which a lot more nouns are gendered). However, if you agree, I think that much it should mention an example like in the grammatical gender article, like show a subject and a gendered noun as an example, but also show a noun which isn't gendered (I can't come up with one off the top of my head right now). Currently it reads like something that could be a bit simplified/made easier to understand. thetechie@enwiki (she/they | talk) 17:49, 28 October 2025 (UTC)

The usual account of gender in Tamil is that there are three genders: masculine, feminine, & neuter. There are no nouns without gender. I suspect that when you're talking about nouns that aren't gendered, you mean neuter nouns. If you don't mind, I'd like to remove the claim for dispute on factual accuracy, as I don't think that this is inaccurate—at least not in this way. We can & should keep work on making it clearer, & I think your proposal of using clearly gendered nouns as subjects is a good one. Pathawi (talk) 18:02, 28 October 2025 (UTC)

@Pathawi: Sorry, I'm just coming back to this now. If you agree with the needed task, then please feel free to do it. Thanks, TheTechie (she/they) 17:30, 30 March 2026 (UTC)

I would like to work on a full restructuring of this article

Currently the article is not properly supported by enough citations, and doesn't have a very good structure in my opinion. Since I do want to change many portions, I thought I would start by deciding on a good set of references. Lehmann's grammar I have found to be the best for Literary Tamil, and Schiffman for Spoken Tamil.

Maybe the article could be split into two sections? Or in each section, under two subheadings, the different varieties be discussed. I am not sure what the correct way would be, as I haven't seen other similar articles (that weren't split into different articles altogether).

I also have some other authoritative grammars that could be used. And I would like to directly point to inline citations more, as currently there are very few. - SourceIsOpen (talk) 15:13, 28 March 2026 (UTC)

I would also like to note that as Lehmann notes, Tamil is a complicated language and using the Tolkappiyam or Nannul as references seems inappropriate, and modern texts which are able to refer to both such historical sources along with modern usage must instead be used. Given that Old Tamil and Middle Tamil grammar differs in many places (more so for Old Tamil), it seems more appropriate to exposit on current literary Tamil and note some differences in Old Tamil. Again with trying to write on 2-3 varieties in one article, I am not sure what structure would be appropriate, and so I would appreciate any advice on that. - SourceIsOpen (talk) 15:19, 28 March 2026 (UTC)

I agree that Lehmann & Schiffman are good choices for starting points. I also agree that the focus of the current article should be modern: Tolkāppiyam terminology may be useful insofar as it remains used to describe modern Tamil grammar, but the Tolkāppiyam itself isn't a good source for modern Tamil. A separate page for Old Tamil grammar might be called for. (I'm not suggesting that you should do it, or that a rewrite of this page needs to wait for that.) I think it's difficult for a page to describe the grammar of more than one variety. Arabic grammar only handles the formal written language, with description of local spoken varieties in the pages for those varieties. Separate pages for செந்தமிழ் & colloquial would be one way to handle it, tho I'm not confident it's the best way. Pathawi (talk) 20:30, 28 March 2026 (UTC)

For nouns, I guess differences in spoken from literary could simply be noted in a subsection. However for verbs and some elements of syntax, I am not sure if that is completely possible. I guess one could note a few elements of Old Tamil without going in depth. Currently the Tamil language page doesn't really note all the different varieties properly either, so I guess that would have to be explained first. As Lehmann notes, Modern Literary Tamil is the variety used in writing today, which does differ from Middle Tamil (nannul) and quite a lot from Old Tamil (Tolkappiyam). I guess that's a starting point. - SourceIsOpen (talk) 07:23, 29 March 2026 (UTC)

(also, if you do have other modern linguistic sources for Literary Tamil, do let me know. I know Lehmann builds off of the work of several older works, but it's the only comprehensive one I'm aware of. Maybe it would help in not relying on a singular source.) - SourceIsOpen (talk) 07:27, 29 March 2026 (UTC)

Not off the top of my head (I do Kannada; Tamil is kind of a peripheral curiosity), but my university library has a pretty well-endowed Dravidian studies section. I'll take a look today or tomorrow when I'm in. My starting point when looking for first sources on the structure of a language is always Glottolog. There are a few possibilities to check out there. Pathawi (talk) 15:53, 29 March 2026 (UTC)