Summer of the following year, he left for his native country. At his old school at Hurtford he became the Assistant Oriental Professor. He wrote a Tamil Grammar book in English called “Rudiments of Tamil Grammar Combining with the Rules of KodunTamul or The Ordinary Dialect And Introduction to Sentamil Or The Elegant Dialect of Language.” This was printed in 1821 from London.

2. THE REV. PHILIP BALDE

“The first grammar of the Tamil language by a foreigner now available is that of Balde, a Dutch Missionary; but he himself refers to previous studies on the subject, especially that of the Jesiut Father Caspardaquilar, which unfortunately are all lost to us.”¹

This Balde was the Rev. Philip Baelde or Baldaeus. He was born in 1632 at Delft. In 1655, he came out as a missionary to the East. He arrived in the Malabar country on the 28th January, 1664. A year later he returned home and on his return he wrote a book about Ceylon, Malabar and the Coromandel which was printed only in 1672 after his death. He learnt Portuguese and Tamil with the main intention of reconverting the Portuguese converts to Protestantism. He was quite successful at Jaffna but was not able to make any headway among the Paravās around Tuticorin.

Paleography in Tamil has been studied only on the basis of inscriptions on stone and copper plates. The cursory writings found in manuscripts (ōlai) and leather will naturally differ from these in certain respects, but these for the purpose of Paleography until now have not been sufficiently studied. Balde’s manuscript perhaps is the oldest now available, though it is believed “that there are manuscripts of an earlier age in Tibet.”² Balde’s work

1. Prof. T.P. Meenakshisundaran. Sixty First Birthday Commemoration Volume. Collected Papers of Prof. T. P. Meenakshisundaran, Annamalai University, Jan. 1961. P.160.

2. Ibid. P. 169.