A Reference Grammar of Classical Tamil Poetry: 150 B.C.-Pre-fifth/Sixth Century A.D..

• Author: Cutler, Norman

By V. S. Rajam Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1992. Pp. xvi + 1101. $45.

It has frequently been pointed out that among India's many living languages, Tamil has the longest continuous literary history, a history approximately two millennia in duration. This is not to imply, however, that the Tamil language as it is employed in speech and writing today and the language of the earliest Tamil poems are identical. To the contrary, the language of classical Tamil poetry is sufficiently foreign to most native Tamil speakers that the poems are frequently published accompanied by "translations" into a more familiar and accessible idiom. From the vantage point of the modern-day native speaker of Tamil, the foreignness of classical Tamil poetry encompasses aspects of both grammar and lexicon, and it is precisely these two dimensions of the language of the classical Tamil poems that have been addressed in two recently published reference works. Both take as their point of departure the same field of data, 2,381 poems of varying length attributed to 473 poets and collected in "eight anthologies" (etuttokai) and a ninth anthology consisting of "ten [long] songs" (pattuppattu). Most of the poems included in this corpus were probably composed between the first century and the third century C.E., though some may have been composed as late as the fifth century C.E.

Thomas Lehmann and Thomas Malten have compiled an index of all words occurring in the corpus of classical Tamil poetry. The entries appear in Tamil script and are listed according to Tamil alphabetical order. The index identifies each occurrence of a word in the poetic corpus, without giving definitions, by poem and line number. The pages are clearly printed in double columns and are easy to read. This is certainly a useful reference tool for anyone wishing to locate the occurrence(s) of one or more words in the classical Tamil corpus, for whatever reason. But it should be mentioned that this is not the first index of its kind. As Lehmann and Malten themselves point out in their introduction, an index of words occurring in the eight anthologies, ten songs, as well as other early Tamil texts was published between 1967 and 1970 by the French Institute of Indology in Pondicherry. However, Lehmann and Malten, unlike the French Institute scholars, explicitly delineate and presumably are more rigorous in the application of criteria for identifying words for inclusion in their index, thus...