India teems with some 850 languages born of at least four distinct families. Indo-European (represented by Hindi, Panjabi, Sinhalese and many others) gets the most attention through its sheer force of number, but compared to the Dravidian and Munda1 families it’s a relative newcomer. Starting at around 1500 B.C.E.2 proto-Sanskrit-speaking cattle farmers poured in from the northwest and ultimately swept most of their predecessors toward the southern and eastern extremes of the subcontinent, quite similar to the way medieval Germanic invaders overwhelmed the Celts and Picts in the British Isles and "marginalized" them toward Ireland, Wales, Cornwall and Scotland. Telugu, Tamil, Kannada and Malayalam3 make up the Dravidian Big Four; but among them Tamil can claim the longest written history. It’s the first language for about fifty-five million speakers, living mostly in and around the state of Tamilnadu that surrounds the city of Madras — now called Chennai — and in northern Sri Lanka. The Tamil alphabet offers two distinct T sounds, two Rs, three Ls and five different types of N. Grammar varies across three dimensions: caste (Brahmin vs. non-Brahmin), discourse status (political speeches as opposed to, say, gossiping with your neighbor) and region. In addition, verb forms specify the speaker’s mental attitude toward his or her subject — sympathetic, disparaging, relieved that something bad is now over, and so on. There are eight noun cases. Below you’ll find Tamil’s principally non-Indo-European terms for the solar system. In cases where the popular name and the scholarly one differ, the latter — more purely Dravidian, usually — appears in brackets. |
 [Ñayiru] |
 [arivan] |
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 [ulakam] |
 [tinkal] |
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 [kaari] |
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 Nobel Laureate Sir C.V. Raman |
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1. Munda happens to mean "widow" in Hindi. Santali is the most prominent Munda language
with about three million speakers. 2. More progressive scholars dispute this date, arguing that the more ancient Indus Valley script is actually Indo-European and as such would push back this “invasion” by at least another millennium or two. 3. Pronounced mah-lay-AH-lam, entirely unrelated to Malay. |
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