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on
the Indian soil not before 2000 B.C. The first Tamil Academy seems to
have flourished not later than 5000 B.C. when the language had no other
name than Tamil. This chronology proves the preposterousness of Dr.Caldwell's
conclusion. Even without chronological evidence it is easier to derive
‘Dravida’ from ‘Tamil’ than ‘Tamil’ from ‘Dravida,’ and hence the correction
of the mistake by Dr.Grierson in his Linguistic Survey of India. It also
naturally seems improbable and absurd on the face of it, that the highly
civilized Tamilian people residing in the extreme south should remain
for long wihout a name for their language or themselves and then be called
by the Aryan immigrants, not by a Tamil but by a Sanskrit name.
The
etymology of the word Tamil, as I have already stated at the outset, is
not yet known. Some attribute to the word the meaning ‘that which singularly
possesses the letter ‘‰’, and some others
‘sweetness.’ Both of these do not hold water, as the former demands comparison
with all the other languages of the world as a prerequisite, and the latter
only expresses the high esteem in which the language is held by the people
who speak it. The only way to sqeeze a plausible meaning out of the word
is to treat it as a corruption of the compound word tam-il, which may
mean either ‘one's house’ or ‘one's country’. Originally it may have been
prefixed to mo‰i as an epithet so that the
whole may have meant ‘house-hold language’ or ‘language of homeland’,
and denoted the refined speech of Tamil Nadu which differed from that
of contiguous northern countries called mo‰i
peyar d„yam, ‘countries where the speech
changed or was in the transitional stage’. Then, in course of time, the
epithet itself may have come to denote the language, and gradually evolved
into the present form Tami‰. Mutation of
1 into ‰ is not uncommon in derivation.
Comp. mƒl-ma‰ai
(cloud or raiŒ, kal-kƒ˜-kƒ˜-kƒ‰
(blackness).
“The
word Tamil occurs in all the ancient Tamil classics as a common or generic
name for the people and their language in India. The word is as old as
the Tamil language and hence there is no need to derive it from foreign
words like Dravida”.1
1.D.I.P.58
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