a small poem called ākkiyōn varalāṟu in which the year of com-position is given as the Christian era 1732 and the corresponding Hindu year as Salivahana 1648.

About four years earlier in 1728 Beschi wrote his Kodun Tamil. In this he promised to produce a grammar and lexicon for High Tamil in the near future. He kept his word. He wrote two separate dictionaries since the Tamil language according to Beschi himself had two dialects; one called Kodun Tamil and the other Sentamil; one conspicuously different from the other. The differences may be likened to the differences betwixt Latin and Portuguese.²

Beschi vividly reveals in the preface the role played by grammar and the dictionary in the study of a foreign language. In grammar, the rules of any art are given arranged in an order and in the dictionary he gives the material and the means by which the grammar rules are made use of.

All the dictionaries that Beschi wrote were chiefly intended for the use of foreign missionaries. The dictionary mentioned above deals only with Tamil, whereas the two others explain words in other languages like Latin, French and Portuguese. Beschi felt his Tamil dictionary besides benefiting the foreign missionaries should be profitable to the natives also. He explains Tamil words in Tamil and the explanations are in common Tamil, the synonyms and paraphrases are also in ordinary terms. Beschi says “This method will not prove useless, in my opinion to Europeans for anyone ignorant of the common language should not, I think, approach the higher Tamil by leap and jump.”³

Beschi made an exhaustive and penetrative study of the ancient poems in Tamil. He says “I went through the books of ancient authors-tiṉakaram, nikaṉtu, piṅkalantai, uriccol, etc., all of which are synonyms not dictionaries.” He read carefully the commentaries of those authors. He discovered that many errors

2. Beschi, auct, Praef, Vulgaris Tamulicae Linguae, Dictionarium Tamulico-Latinnum 3 Duplicam exposui.

3. Ibid.