any fear of contradiction is, that it is a pure Tamil word being current as the only name of the language of the Tamils, from the days that preceded the First Tamil Academy established at Thenmadurai on the river pahŠu˜i in the submerged continent.

     After some of the Vedic Aryans migrated to the South, Tamil got the descriptive name ‘Tenmo˜i’ lit. ‘the southern language’, in contradistinction to the Vedic language or Sanskrit which was called ‘Vadamo˜i’, lit. ‘the northern language’.

     The word ‘Tamil’ or ‘Tamilan’ successively changed into ‘Dramila’, ‘Drami˜a’, ‘Dramida’ and ‘Dravida’ in North India and at first denoted only the Tamil language, as all the other Dravidian dialects separated themselves from Tamil or came into prominence one by one only after the dawn of the Christian era. That is why Sanskrit and Tamil came to be known as Vadamoi and Te‹mo‰i respectively. This distinction could have arisen only when there were two languages standing side by side, one in the North and the other in the South, both coming in contact with each other. The Buddhist Tamil Academy which flourished in the 5th century at Madurai, went by the name of ‘Trƒvida Sangam’. Pi˜˜ai-l†kƒcƒriyar, a Vai™-ava Acƒrya of the 14th century refers to Tamil literature as ‘Drƒvida Sƒstram’. Even Tƒyumƒ‹avar a Tamilian saint who lived in the 18th century, employs the word ‘Trƒvidam’ to designate Tamil, on account of the established usage of the term in religious literature.

     Telugu was the first Dravidian dialect to separate from Tamil, and so, Kumƒrila-Bha——a, an eminent Brahmin writer of the 7th century A.D., uses the term Andhra-Drƒvida-bhƒshƒ, ‘the Telugu-Tamil language’ for the first time to designate the entire family of the Dravidian languages.

     Whether the initial letter is voiced or voiceless, we do not find an ‘r’ inserted after it in any of the various forms of the word ‘Tamil’ employed by foreigners, as in those used by North-Indians or Sanskritists. In the Indian segment of the Peutinger Tables, we find the names Damirice and Dymirice, and in the Cosmography of the geographer of Ravenna, the name Dimirica. We can safely identify these names with Tamilakam, by which name the Tamil