In their efforts to create accessible pedagogical grammars of Tamil, early missionaries applied the reference model of Latin and Portuguese grammars and other missioners’ works to the nominal and verbal paradigms they constructed of the language. In so doing, they met with difficulties in formulating the terminology to express the phenomena they encountered. For example, the early missionary grammarians regularly classed several distinct Tamil terminations as ‘ablatives’, because the various senses of these are subsumed in Latin within one ablative case (itself historically derived from three Proto-Indo-European cases: separative ablative, comitative/instrumental, and inessive locative). Different configurations were proposed over the centuries, but, despite the emerging knowledge of the native Tamil grammatical tradition, which had long been influenced by Sanskrit declensional standards, always with a Latinate foundation. The missionaries’ grammars created among Europeans a perception of Tamil that its declensional patterning was akin to that of Latin, and that morphologically realised divergent senses are related because their equivalents in Latin are, readings which persist in many modern didactic descriptions.
In their preface to the
The translators added that Tamil was “tã barbara q͂ alguas dições cõ nenhũs carateres latinos se podẽ pronũciar” [‘so outlandish that some words cannot be pronounced with Latin letters’]. The situation was rather the opposite, however – the Latin alphabet was inadequate to represent the sounds of Tamil. Similarly, in his posthumously published
Some missionaries, even as late as in the nineteenth century, described dialectal variations of a standard language as ‘barbarous’: for example, Eliza Caldwell (
Županov (
Although Tamil is morphologically agglutinative, its patternings were perceived by early missionaries as conforming more or less to the mould of Greek or Latin – at least for didactic purposes. The important paradigmatic similarities between Tamil, and Latin and Greek could thus be readily analyzed, and taught to Europeans, using the traditional Latinate terminology with which they were conversant. Undoubtedly, a key motivation in the formulation of Tamil grammar by the early missionaries was pedagogical, to teach an unfamiliar language by funnelling it through learners’ existing linguistic knowledge:
Tamil was ‘harnessed’ by and ‘reorganized’ into the rules of conjugation and declension defined by the Latin grammarians. Every single verbal form was assigned its Latin or Portuguese analogue, whether it fitted perfectly and seamlessly or not. Even today, some of these verbal forms are considered as ‘defying’ the grammatical classification applied to Indo-European languages. (
The tendency was indeed to go further, to read into Tamil not only the inflectional structure of Latin, but also the scope of the declensions.
In
1st | names and descriptors of males in - |
2nd | (2a) words ending in - |
3rd | words in - |
4th | words in - |
5th | words in - |
Henriques also identified a five-case paradigm in Tamil, to which he gave the Latinate names: nominative, vocative, accusative, genitive, dative. Barros (
Do sexto cáso a que chamam Ablatiuo, se usa, tirãdo ou apartando a cousa dalgũ lugár per este exemplo, eu tiro muita doutrina dos liuros. E se disser, eu tiro muita doutrina dos liuros com meu trabálho, fica este nome trabálho, em otro cáso seitimo, a que os Latinos chamam effectiuo. Este cáso se rege desta proposiçam, com, e nelle está o instrumento com que obrámos algũa cousa per o exemplo decima.
[‘The sixth case, which they call the ablative, is used when taking or separating something from a place, as in this example:
Henriques did not include an ablative in his Tamil paradigm, though he mentioned such in his discussion: “the ablative ends in -
Pedro esta ẽ cassa, pedro vithile jRuquiRan | [‘Pedro is at home, |
O capitão esta em Punicale, |
[‘The officer is in Punicale, |
Henriques availed himself of the ‘services’ of a local teacher to help him learn Tamil, but what is not known is the formal linguistic nature of the teacher’s tuition. Later missionaries also acknowledged help from local teachers of Tamil or other native speakers with recognised expertise in the language (what their reaction might have been to the Europeans branding Tamil as ‘barbarous’ is unknown). Tamil scholars had been studying the grammar of their own language for several centuries, but it seems that Henriques was unaware of their analyses, and he modelled his own version on a Graeco-Latin prototype. Indeed, it is not known to what extent any of the missionaries’ informants drew their tyros’ attention to the various analyses in their own grammatical tradition.
The earliest extant indigenous grammar of Tamil is
[‘These (are): the name, ai, oṭu, ku, iṉ, atu, kaṇ and finally the calling case’]. |
Adopting the Latin-based terminology used by Zvelebil (
1st case | the name, nominative | |
2nd case | - |
the - |
3rd case | - |
the - |
4th case | - |
the - |
5th case | - |
the - |
6th case | - |
the - |
7th case | - |
the - |
8th case | the calling case, vocative |
However, the clustering of the various nominal suffixes of Tamil, a Dravidian language, into eight cases was provenanced from the cases of the unrelated Indo-European language, Sanskrit (nominative, vocative, accusative, instrumental, dative, ablative, genitive, locative):
Because Tamil grammatical tradition was influenced from the beginning by Sanskrit grammatical theory, Tamil, even in its earliest grammar (
Schiffman is echoing Caldwell’s (
The imitation of Sanscrit in this particular was certainly an error; for whilst in Sanscrit there are eight cases only, the number of cases in Tamil, Telugu, &c., is indefinite. Every post-position annexed to a noun constitutes, properly speaking, a new case. … Notwithstanding this, the usage of Drâvidian grammarians has restricted the number of cases to eight. … Drâvidian grammarians have arranged the case system of their nouns in the Sanscrit order, and in doing so have done violence to the genius of their own grammar. It is very doubtful whether the Drâvidian ‘ablative of motion’ and the ‘locative’ are not one and the same case, though represented as different by grammarians, in deference to Sanscrit precedents; and the Drâvidian ‘social ablative,’ as some have called it, or rather, as it should be termed, ‘the conjunctive case,’ has been omitted in each dialect from the list of cases, or added on to the instrumental, simply because it is a case of which the Sanscrit knows nothing. The only reason why the case-signs of the conjunctive are classed in Tamil with that of the instrumental is that the fact of their being destitute of a proper place of their own is less obvious in that position than it would be in any other.
Thus, what is certainly an artificial paradigm with respect to Tamil predated early missionary descriptions by many centuries.
Zvelebil notes (
the marker -
And on the 5th case, he observes that
broad enough … to account for a broad range of semantic possibilities covered by a case which is only very approximatively termed ‘ablative’. According to the commentators … the basic relationship this case expresses are the following …: comparison (
In
Abl. quietis | |
Abl. instrum[entalis] | |
Abl. social[is] |
And he added “Outros casos ou modos de fal[ar]” [‘other cases or forms of expression’]:
The (compound) terminations -
Declensions in Latin are traditionally classified according to the different patterns of nominal suffixation; the surface stem alterations within them are sometimes predictable, sometimes variable. In Tamil, the endings are stable, and stem changes for the most part predictable. Costa recognised this, and suggested that Tamil could thus be said to have just one declension, with four major varieties based on the types of stem changes occurring in the oblique cases. His four subtypes are:
1. | no stem change | (Henriques: 1st, 2nd, 4th, 5th a, b) |
2. | - |
(Henriques: 3rd) |
3. | - |
(Henriques: 5th c) |
4. | - |
(Henriques: 5th c). |
Costa acknowledged a debt to his predecessors’ work on Tamil, in particular that of Gaspar de Aguilar (1588–16??), a native of Figueira de Castelo Rodrigo in the diocese of Guarda, who had served in the Jaffna area of Sri Lanka and Kochi (Cochin) in India between 1619 and 1645, and who was renowned for his mastery of Tamil and his expertise in teaching it (
This is a clear evidence that the model missionaries used to follow when compiling their grammatical explanations was Latin. However, it also shows that missionaries, even when restrained by their basic model, were able to recognize the differences from their mother tongue or language model. Aguilar shows that he knows indigenous grammatical traditions,
For the first century of missionary activity, then, we witness a progressive maturity of approach to Tamil declensional description. As the missionaries became aware of the indigenous works of grammar, often through the intermediary of a local scholar, they strove to incorporate this knowledge into their own studies. At the same time, since the native grammars
When the Protestant churches began to send missionaries to South Asia, the personnel were able to capitalize on the linguistic efforts of their Portuguese Catholic predecessors. Philippus Baldaeus (Baelde) (1632–1671), a native of Delft in the then Dutch Republic, and a pastor of the Dutch Reformed Church in Sri Lanka, in his
localis | [‘of place’] = Henriques/Costa, stative |
causalis | [‘of cause’] = Henriques/Costa, instrumental |
socialis | [‘of association’] = Henriques/Costa, sociative |
comparationis | [‘of comparison’] not identified by Henriques or Costa. |
Baldaeus’s quadripartite classification of the ablative reflected the analysis elaborated by Aguilar, whom he referenced as a source of his own work (
The first Protestant missionaries in India were the German Pietists, Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg (1682–1719) and Heinrich Plütschau (1677–1752), who, under the patronage of King Frederick IV of Denmark, arrived in the Danish colony of Tranquebar (now Tharangambadi), on the coast of Tamil Nadu, in 1706. Within two years, Ziegenbalg had begun the task of translating the New Testament into Tamil, an undertaking he completed in 1711. On Tamil, he wrote:
[Die Malarabische Sprache] ist eine gantz eigene Sprache … und zwar eine recht
[Tamil is] a
We may note that
In his
1st | - |
= Henriques: 1st, 2nd b |
2nd | - |
= Henriques: 3rd |
3rd | - |
= Henriques: 5th c |
4th | - |
= Henriques: 2nd a. |
He divided the ablative into three: locative (
A contemporary – and outspoken religious adversary (see
[‘
Evidently, then, he was aware of the formal usage of these suffixes.
It was, however, the Italian Jesuit, Costanzo Beschi (1680–1742), who first made explicit in a printed work how Tamil grammarians traditionally analyzed their language, and adapted this knowledge to his own description of Tamil. In so doing, however, he faced a dilemma:
Beschi était confronté à un double problème: il devait d’une part fournir une description du tamoul utilisable facilement par d’autres missionnaires européens, ce qui l’amenait à conserver un plan de grammaire latine. Il voulait aussi, semble-t-il, donner directement accès à la tradition grammaticale tamoule elle-même, ce qui lui posait de difficiles problèmes terminologiques.
[‘Beschi was faced with a twofold problem: on the one hand, he had to provide a description of Tamil which other European missionaries could use easily, which led him to keep to a Latin grammatical schema. But it appears that he also wanted to offer direct access to the Tamil grammatical tradition itself, something which caused him difficult problems of terminology.’] (
In his
Propriè non est in hâc linguâ nisi unius declinationis: omnium quippe nominum casus unico declinantur modo. Numerant ipsi octo casus … et eos nominant ex formâ terminationis, v. g. accusativus, cùm desinat in
[‘In this language, there is in a proper sense just one declension: indeed all the cases of nouns are declined in a single way. They themselves count eight cases … which they name from the form of the ending, e.g., the accusative, which ends in
He noted that two of the eight cases “ad ablativum reduci possunt” [‘may be reduced to the ablative’: Beschi, tr.
Ablativus quietis vel existentiæ [‘stative or existential ablative’] | |
Ablativus instrumenti seu causæ [‘instrumental or causal ablative’] | |
Ablativus societatis et aliquando instrumenti [‘sociative and sometimes instrumental ablative’] |
Beschi (
Addunt aliqui tres alios casus, quos ablativos vocant: scilicet
[‘Some add three further cases, which they call ablatives: thus,
(His reference is to
- |
dative ( |
accusative ( |
|
accusative ( |
Beschi (
In the declensions of nouns … both in the common and in the superior dialect … [b]eside the nominative form proper to each noun, and beside the terminations of cases in both numbers, common to all nouns, there is yet another termination of forms, which I shall denominate
In his chapter on syntax, Beschi added that the stative in -
1er … qui correspond proprement a notre ablatif
[‘1st … which corresponds to our ablative in …
2e cet ablatif exprime le mouvement de lieu …
[‘2nd This ablative expresses motion from a place …
3e cet ablatif se prend dans la comparaison quand on dit qu’une chose est meilleure qu’une autre; car alors cequi est moindre, se met a l’ablatif en
[‘3rd This ablative is used in comparison when one says that something is better than another; since what is the lesser is put into the ablative in
De Valence’s second ablative is Beschi’s “Ablativus instrumenti seu causæ” in -
… d’ou il est pris particulierement pour expliquer la cause ou efficient, ou materiel, ou instrumentelle, ou même conditionelle …
[‘which is taken to express the cause or efficient, or material, or instrumental, or even conditional;
Beschi’s third ablative, “Ablativus societatis et aliquando instrumenti”, de Valence explained thus:
Le 3e ablatif.
[‘The 3rd ablative,
Pierre de la Lane, on the other hand, seemingly rather strangely, noted in his attributed work,
L’ablatif ne se distingue gueres que par une preposition, hors de la il nya gueres d’ablatif quj aît une inflexion particuliere et sans preposition.
[‘The ablative is hardly ever distinguished except by a preposition, otherwise there are hardly any ablatives with a specific inflection and no preposition.’]
Yet in his examples of the five morphosemantically defined six-case nominal declensions which he identified, he cited the ablative as the 6th case, with three terminations:
de/par [‘by’], i.e., instrumental | |
avec [‘with’], i.e., sociative | |
en/dans [‘in’], i.e., locative |
Clarity is achieved by his later statement (1728: 47–48):
Tous les noms de Royaume, de ville, village, et appellatifs quj appartiennent a la question – Ubi se mettent a l’ablatif avec la Preposition -
[‘All the names of kingdoms, towns and villages, as well as appellatives, which answer the question Whither? are put into the ablative with the preposition -
De la Lane, then, identified the endings of the Tamil ablative not as inflections, but derivational
In
The third case is our
This analysis of three ablatives was widespread, and is found in a range of non-linguistic sources of the period: e.g.,
Je connus aussi que les Tamouls … avoient trois ablatifs sans préposition: l’un de lieu, un autre de causalité, et un troisième de compagnie.
[‘I learnt also that the Tamils … had three ablatives without prepositions: one of place, another of cause, and a third of association.’]
Les déclinaisons renferment huit cas, distingués entre eux par les terminaisons (comme en latin); outre l’ablatif désinant en
[‘The declensions contain eight cases, distinguished one from the other by endings (as in Latin); apart from the ablative in
And
Tamil nouns have eight cases, three of which are ablatives, and are distinguished as local, causal, and social ablatives.
Following Beschi, Rhenius (
Besides the eight cases already mentioned there is a case, called the general oblique case. It is used either as the 6th [genitive] or the 7th [locative] case. It is variously formed. One form of it is made by adding,
The French missionaries Louis-Marie Mousset (1808–1888) and Louis-Savinien Dupuis (1806–1874), in their
[‘
They also cited -
[‘
Another lexicographer of the period, the Lutheran, Johann Peter Rottler (1749–1836), in
Julien Vinson (1843–1926), born into a French family living in Puducherry,
Les grammairiens tamouls qui ont copié servilement ceux du nord ont attribué à leur langue un ablatif en …
[‘The Tamil grammarians who slavishly copied those of the North,
In
Cäse,
Nomʹin-a-tive,
Ac-cūsʹa-tive, (case,)
Dāʹtive (
Lōcʹa-tive (
Ablative, (cases),
Here, at the headword
III | Ablative of connexion | (i) by means of | |
(ii) together with | |||
V | Ablative of place from whence | ||
VII | Locative or Ablative of place wherein or whither: at, in, with |
European missionaries often described the languages they met in different parts of the world as ‘imperfect’ or ‘deficient’ because they did not fit into the familiar morphosyntactic mould of the Graeco-Latin patterns with which they were familiar. Despite the many different schemata that have been suggested over the past four hundred years, the representations made on the basis of Latin by the Portuguese in the mid-sixteenth century for Tamil – the “most vigorous” of the languages of India (
This work represents a focused extension and expansion of some ideas I presented at the Third International Conference on Missionary Linguistics, in Macao in March 2005 (
For views on the meaning of βαρβαρόφωνος, see Mac Sweeney (
That is, at Idaiyangudi, an agricultural town in Tirunelveli district in Tamil Nadu, where Robert Caldwell spent most of his missionary life. His wife, Eliza, née Mault (1822–1899), was born into a missionary family in Nagarkovil (Nagercoil), and spoke Tamil with native fluency.
In early European references to Tamil,
Cf. de la Lane (
Punnaikayal, the main Portuguese settlement on the southern coast of India during the second half of the sixteenth century.
See Županov (
Cf. Proença’s (
Aguilar was dismissed from the Society of Jesus in 1645, accused of various felonious activities including womanizing and incurring debts (see
I have not seen this grammar, and the details given here are taken from Muru (
In
The 6th case, according to the Latin order, viz., ablative. In Sanskrit, the 6th case is the genitive.
In addition to
Van Buitenen & Ganeshsundaram (
See also Van Buitenen & Ganeshsundaram (
Muru (
Cf.
Cf.
See also Jeyaraj (
Sweetman & Ilakkuvan (
Cf. English missionaries of Madras (
See
In many languages, the sociative, or comitative, case is often indistinguishable from the instrumental: see e.g., Stolz et al. (
Cf. English Missionaries of Madras (
Beschi, tr. Horst (
Cf. the 5th Case in
The authorship of this dictionary is disputed by Xavier Raj (
See
Cf. Beschi, tr. Horst (
Vinson was not a missionary. He began his working life as a civil servant, later becoming a teacher of Hindustani and Tamil at the École nationale des langues orientales vivantes in Paris.
From the north of India, thus referring to grammarians of Sanskrit.
I should like to thank Cristina Muru for her helpful advice and suggestions, and the anonymous reviewer for his/her constructive observations, on my draft submission.
The author has no competing interests to declare.