Beschi’s Caturakarāti. Thus we see that Beschi has more-or-less “set the standard for all subsequent lexicographers.”¹³

Bilingual Dictionaries

Apart from commencing work on Tamil dictionaries, European scholars worked on bilinguaal dictionaries also. Attempts on this line had been made prior to Beschi and Ziegenbalg but these works are not available.

Fr. Henrique Henriques S. J. in his many letters to Europe wrote about a vocabulary of Tamil words and terms.¹⁴ Fr. Antony de Proenza is reputed to be the author of the first printed Tamil Dictionary.¹⁵ The Jesuit press at Ambalakat in 1679 printed this dictionary along with some manuscript works of Frs. Robert-de-Nobili, Bruno and Martin.¹⁶ Printing was still quite new to India. This dictionary was a Portuguese-Tamil one and the former section was printed in movable type and the latter part was engraved on wooden blocks. The dictionary follows the alphabetical order only for the first letter.

Fr. Beschi in his preface to the dictionary of common Tamil admits the existence of earlier dictionaries. He also accepts that they helped him in his work but Beschi says that they could not be confidently relied upon. He says “their works, however, have either perished or have been - I do not know how - so spoilt that one cannot confidently follow them without necessarily falling into the pit like the blind following the blind”. Fr. Aloysius de Bourges, was a tireless worker. After many years of study and labour, he prepared a huge dictionary. This dictionary unfortunately had two defects. The author first mixed up words of common Tamil with those of higher Tamil and then synonyms

13. Srinivasan T., The New Review, Aug-Sept. 1935

14. Rev. Dr. Xavier Thaniyanayakam, Tamil Culture, July 1958. “The First Books printed in Tamil”

16. S. Manuel, The Jesuits in Tamil, P. 5