Tamil loanwords in other languages

Last updated

In Ancient Greek

Tamil loanwords in Ancient Greek came about due to the interactions of Mediterranean and South Indian merchants. Tamil loanwords entered the Greek language throughout different periods in history. Most words had to do with items of trade that were unique to South India. Although there is general consensus that there are Tamil loanwords in Ancient Greek, few of the words have competing etymologies as well. [1]

Contents

In Biblical Hebrew

The importance of Tamil loanwords in Biblical Hebrew is that linguistically these words are the earliest attestation of the Tamil language. These words were incorporated into the writing of the Hebrew Bible starting before 500 BCE. Although a number of authors have identified many Biblical and post-Biblical words of Tamil, Old Tamil, or Dravidian origin, a number of them have competing etymologies and some Tamil derivations are considered controversial. [2]

In English

In Malay

Loanwords from Tamil, mainly exist in cuisine, like Chinese and unlike Sanskrit. It mainly entered the lexicon of Classical Malay (and by extension, its Modern and Indonesian variants) with the immigration of South Indian traders who settled around the Strait of Malacca. See also Wiktionary:Appendix:Malay words of Tamil origin.

In Mauritian Creole

In Tagalog

Close contact through commercial networks between India and Maritime Southeast Asia for more than two millennia, bolstered by the establishment of Tamil as a literary language in India starting from the 9th century, allowed the spread of Dravidian loanwords in several local languages of Southeast Asia, including Old Malay and Tagalog. A list of Tagalog words with Tamil origins are shown below. [10]

In Indonesian

Loanwords from Tamil, while also an Indian language (though not Indo-European like Sanskrit), mainly exist in cuisine, like Chinese and unlike Sanskrit. It is a Dravidian language and not an Indo-Aryan language. However, Hinduism had great impact in Tamil, there are several Indo-Aryan loanwords in Tamil and they are possibility to list them in Indo-Aryan loanwords, such as Sanskrit.

Interaction between Tamil speakers and Malay speakers has been established from ancient time. Tamil influence has been around such as Palava usage as ancient script in Indonesia (Palava dynasty was existed on 275 CE–897 CE) and Chola invasion of Srivijaya in 1025. It mainly entered the lexicon of Malay (and by extension, Indonesian) with the immigration of South Indian traders who settled around the Strait of Malacca.

In Russian

RussianTamilMeaningEnglish word
катамаранகட்டு மரம்tied logsCatamaran

In Sinhala

Sinhala words of Tamil origin came about as part of the more than 2,000 years of language interactions between Sinhala and Tamil in the island of Sri Lanka, as well as through Dravidian substratum effect on the Sinhala Language.

In Sinhala words

In the following list, Tamil words are romanised in accordance with Tamil spelling. This results in seeming discrepancies in voicing between Sinhala words and their Tamil counterparts. Sinhala borrowing, however, has taken place on the basis of the sound of the Tamil words; thus, the word ampalam, [ambalam], logically results in the Sinhala spelling ambalama, and so forth. However, the Tamil language used here for comparison is Tamil as spoken in Sri Lanka.

In Sinhala verbs

Several verbs have been adopted into Sinhala from the Tamil language. The vast majority of these are compound verbs consisting of a Tamil origin primary verb and a Sinhala origin light verb.

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dravidian languages</span> Language family mostly of southern India

The Dravidian languages are a family of languages spoken by 250 million people, mainly in southern India, north-east Sri Lanka, and south-west Pakistan. Since the colonial era, there have been small but significant immigrant communities of speakers of those languages in Mauritius, Myanmar, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines, United Kingdom, Australia, France, Canada, Germany, South Africa, and the United States.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sanskrit</span> Ancient Indo-European language of South Asia

Sanskrit is a classical language belonging to the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European languages. It arose in South Asia after its predecessor languages had diffused there from the northwest in the late Bronze Age. Sanskrit is the sacred language of Hinduism, the language of classical Hindu philosophy, and of historical texts of Buddhism and Jainism. It was a link language in ancient and medieval South Asia, and upon transmission of Hindu and Buddhist culture to Southeast Asia, East Asia and Central Asia in the early medieval era, it became a language of religion and high culture, and of the political elites in some of these regions. As a result, Sanskrit had a lasting impact on the languages of South Asia, Southeast Asia and East Asia, especially in their formal and learned vocabularies.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tamil language</span> Dravidian language of South Asia

Tamil is a Dravidian language natively spoken by the Tamil people of South Asia. Tamil is an official language of the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, the sovereign nations of Sri Lanka and Singapore, and the Indian territory of Puducherry. Tamil is also spoken by significant minorities in the four other South Indian states of Kerala, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, and the Union Territory of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. It is also spoken by the Tamil diaspora found in many countries, including Malaysia, Myanmar, South Africa, United Kingdom, United States, Canada, Australia and Mauritius. Tamil is also natively spoken by Sri Lankan Moors. One of 22 scheduled languages in the Constitution of India, Tamil was the first to be classified as a classical language of India.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sinhala language</span> Indo-Aryan language native to Sri Lanka

Sinhala ;, sometimes called Sinhalese, is an Indo-Aryan language primarily spoken by the Sinhalese people of Sri Lanka, who make up the largest ethnic group on the island, numbering about 16 million. Sinhala is also spoken as the first language by other ethnic groups in Sri Lanka, totalling about 2 million people as of 2001. It is written using the Sinhala script, which is a Brahmic script closely related to the Grantha script of South India.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Eelam</span> Native Tamil name for Sri Lanka

Eelam is the native Tamil name for the South Asian island now known as Sri Lanka.

Hindustani, also known as Hindi-Urdu, is the vernacular form of two standardized registers used as official languages in India and Pakistan, namely Hindi and Urdu. It comprises several closely related dialects in the northern, central and northwestern parts of the Indian subcontinent but is mainly based on Khariboli of the Delhi region. As an Indo-Aryan language, Hindustani has a core base that traces back to Sanskrit but as a widely-spoken lingua franca, it has a large lexicon of loanwords, acquired through centuries of foreign rule and ethnic diversity.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Linguistic history of India</span> History of the languages of India

Since the Iron Age in India, the native languages of the Indian subcontinent are divided into various language families, of which the Indo-Aryan and the Dravidian are the most widely spoken. There are also many languages belonging to unrelated language families such as Austroasiatic and Sino-Tibetan, spoken by smaller groups.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tamil-Brahmi</span> Historical abugida script for Tamil

Tamil-Brahmi, also known as Tamizhi or Damili, was a variant of the Brahmi script in southern India. It was used to write inscriptions in the early form of Old Tamil. The Tamil-Brahmi script has been paleographically and stratigraphically dated between the third century BCE and the first century CE, and it constitutes the earliest known writing system evidenced in many parts of Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Andhra Pradesh and Sri Lanka. Tamil Brahmi inscriptions have been found on cave entrances, stone beds, potsherds, jar burials, coins, seals, and rings.

Vedic Sanskrit has a number of linguistic features which are alien to most other Indo-European languages. Prominent examples include: phonologically, the introduction of retroflexes, which alternate with dentals, and morphologically, the formation of gerunds. Some philologists attribute such features, as well as the presence of non-Indo-European vocabulary, to a local substratum of languages encountered by Indo-Aryan peoples in Central Asia (Bactria-Marghiana) and within the Indian subcontinent, including the Dravidian languages.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Devaneya Pavanar</span> Tamil scholar and linguistic writer (1902–1981)

Devaneya Pavanar was a prominent Tamil scholar who wrote over 35 research volumes. Additionally, he was a staunch proponent of the "Pure Tamil movement" and initiated the Etymological Dictionary Project primarily to bring out the roots of Tamil words and their connections and ramifications with Nostratic studies.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dravidian peoples</span> South Asian ethnolinguistic group

The Dravidian peoples, or Dravidians, are an ethnolinguistic and cultural group living in South Asia who predominantly speak any of the Dravidian languages. There are around 250 million native speakers of Dravidian languages. Dravidian speakers form the majority of the population of South India and are natively found in India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, the Maldives, Nepal, Bhutan and Sri Lanka. Dravidian peoples are also present in Singapore, Malaysia, South Africa, Myanmar, East Africa, the Caribbean, and the United Arab Emirates through recent migration.

Tadbhava is the Sanskrit word for one of three etymological classes defined by native grammarians of Middle Indo-Aryan languages, alongside tatsama and deśi words. A "tadbhava" is a word with an Indo-Aryan origin but which has evolved through language change in the Middle Indo-Aryan stage and eventually inherited into a modern Indo-Aryan language. In this sense, tadbhavas can be considered the native (inherited) vocabulary of modern Indo-Aryan languages.

The Tamil language has absorbed many Indo-Aryan, Prakrit, Pali and Sanskrit loanwords ever since the early 1st millennium CE, when the Sangam period Chola kingdoms became influenced by spread of Jainism, Buddhism and early Hinduism. Many of these loans are obscured by adaptions to Tamil phonology.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dravidian folk religion</span> Indigenous Dravidian folk religion

The early Dravidian religion constituted a non-Vedic form of Hinduism in that they were either historically or are at present Āgamic. The Agamas are non-Vedic in origin, and have been dated either as post-Vedic texts, or as pre-Vedic compositions. The Agamas are a collection of Tamil and Sanskrit scriptures chiefly constituting the methods of temple construction and creation of murti, worship means of deities, philosophical doctrines, meditative practices, attainment of sixfold desires and four kinds of yoga. The worship of tutelary deities and sacred flora and fauna in Hinduism is also recognized as a survival of the pre-Vedic Dravidian religion. Dravidian linguistic influence on early Vedic religion is evident; many of these features are already present in the oldest known Indo-Aryan language, the language of the Rigveda, which also includes over a dozen words borrowed from Dravidian. The linguistic evidence for Dravidian impact grows increasingly strong as one moves from the Samhitas down through the later Vedic works and into the classical post-Vedic literature. This represents an early religious and cultural fusion or synthesis between ancient Dravidians and Indo-Aryans that went on to influence Indian civilisation.

The importance of Tamil loanwords in Biblical Hebrew is that linguistically these words are the earliest attestation of the Tamil language. These words were incorporated into the writing of the Hebrew Bible starting before 500 BCE. Although a number of authors have identified many biblical and post-biblical words of Tamil, Old Tamil, or Dravidian origin, a number of them have competing etymologies and some Tamil derivations are considered controversial.

Tamil loanwords in Ancient Greek came about due to the interactions of Mediterranean and South Indian merchants. Tamil loanwords entered the Greek language during different periods in history. Most words had to do with items of trade that were unique to South India. There is a general consensus about Tamil loanwords in Ancient Greek, while a few of the words have competing etymologies.

Deśi words, also known as Deśya words, represent the vocabulary in Indo-Aryan languages which are of non-Indo-European origin, mostly borrowed from Dravidian languages and Munda languages, the languages which are currently native to South India and East India respectively. They are also known as Deshaj words, and considered one of the three etymological classes defined by native grammarians of Middle Indo-Aryan languages, alongside tatsama and tadbhava words. The word "desi" in this context means "local", referring that these loanwords are from the native languages of the Indian subcontinent that existed before the Indo-Aryan migrations.

References

  1. ↑ Zvelebil, Kamil. "Dravidian languages" . Retrieved 5 January 2021.
  2. ↑ Wald, Shalom; Kandel, Arielle. "India, Israel and the Jewish people" . Retrieved 13 September 2021.
  3. ↑ "Aiyo! The English language just usurped my all-purpose south Indian word and sucked the life out of it". Quartz (publication). 10 October 2016. Retrieved 14 October 2020.
  4. ↑ "Catamaran; Define Catamaran at Dictionary.com". Dictionary.reference.com. Retrieved 14 September 2013.
  5. ↑ "Cheroot; Define Cheroot at Dictionary.com". Dictionary.reference.com. Retrieved 14 September 2013.
  6. ↑ "Corundum; Define Corundum at Dictionary.com". Dictionary.reference.com. Retrieved 14 September 2013.
  7. ↑ "mulligatawny, n.". Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2003.
  8. ↑ "patchouli". Online Etymology Dictionary. Retrieved 14 September 2013.
  9. ↑ "Pandal; Define Pandal at Dictionary.com". Dictionary.reference.com. Retrieved 14 September 2013.
  10. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 Hoogervorst, Tom (15 April 2015). "Detecting pre-modern lexical influence from South India in Maritime Southeast Asia". Archipel. Études interdisciplinaires sur le monde insulindien (89): 63–93. doi: 10.4000/archipel.490 . ISSN   0044-8613.
  11. ↑ "Dravidian Etymological Dictionary; Find definition of Appa in Dravidian Etymological Dictionary". dsal.uchicago.edu.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.