Tamil books The Reference Grammar of Spoken Tamil by Harold Schiffman is my favorite Tamil book here; very detailed explanations of everything. I also like Conversational Tamil for its practicality. Basically, for Tamil you have to learn how to read the literary language, but spoken Tamil is quite different still, whereas diglossia has been reduced over the last half century or so since independence in the other main Dravidian languages. Having visited Sri Lanka a couple times, Im also interested in eventually learning some Sri Lankan Tamil, but I need to find some reference materials first. I could kind of make out some of it, but not much, and in areas where they live together with Sinhalese people, the dialect seems much more mixed with Sinhala. Jaffna is supposed to be the purest Sri Lankan Tamil, but I havent been able to visit that area yet. A good thing about Tamil script is that its pretty easy due to the smaller amount of letters compared to other Indian scripts. However, that also makes reading difficult sometimes, because without dedicated letters or diacritics to indicate voiced plosives and other sounds in loanwords, its sometimes hard to figure out what a word is if it isnt a native Tamil word.
Posted on: Wed, 09 Jul 2014 05:05:08 +0000
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