A Historical Grammar of Tamil (Noun Morphology)

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History is essentially the study of the events of the past integral to human society. Language is the creation of the human society endowed with a fairly long history. Among the languages, some have developed written systems while others haven't. The written systems in languages witness widely varying dates of advent in the history of languages. Languages with the written systems have the advantage of written records, documentation. These written records stand useful to understand the historical development of the given language.

Linguistic history is primarily classifiable into internal and external history. The former deals with linguistic changes in the language system embracing phonetics, morphology, syntax and semantics, while the later is the domain of political, social and cultural phenomena which entail interlanguage contact and the consequent give-and-take called borrowings. These borrowings constitute one of the major mechanisms of language change.

As far as the Tamil language is concerned, it has had written records evidently through 2500 years. V. G. Suryanarayana Sastri is credited with the first history of the Tamil language (1903) albeit being marked by generalities as it is, with historical linguistics not having developed as a separate field. at that point. T. P. Meenakshisundaran published his A History of Tamil Language in English in 1964, which deals with the internal and external history of Tamil from the viewpoint of historical linguistics. He has divided the history of the Tamil language not only into Old, Middle and Modern, but also into. Early, Middle and Late with respect to each period basing himself on historical linguistics.

The seventies of the last century witnessed study of individual literary texts from the point of view of descriptive linguistics. There also emerged descriptive studies of a given period, particularly the Sangam period belonging to the Old Tamil era. The present book by Prof. S.V. Shanmugam belongs to this category albeit limiting itself to noun morphology with its gender-number suffixes, inflectional increments, personal pronouns and names of directions. Be that as it may, this is the first book on noun morphology which is part of the internal history of the Tamil language. It should provide the impetus for similar studies of the internal history of the Tamil language.