2.1. Early missionary descriptions of the Tamil ablative case

In Arte da lingua Malabar [Grammar of the Malabar language] (Hein & Rajam 2013), the first pedagogical grammar of Tamil, generally accepted to have been compiled in c.1549 by Henrique Henriques (1520–1600), a native of Vila Viçosa in the archdiocese of Évora, Tamil is said to have five nominal declensions, as has Latin. Henriques, reputed to be the first European to make a scholarly study of an Indian language (Shaw 1987: 5), largely followed the traditional Latin-based terminology used by João de Barros (1496–1570) in Grammatica da lingua portuguesa [Grammar of the Portuguese language] (1540), although, as Zwartjes (2011: 43) shows, he did occasionally make use of novel denominative or explanatory metalanguage for some Tamil syntactic features which did not find parallels in Portuguese or Latin grammar. Whether Henriques explicitly sought five declensions in Tamil is open to speculation, but since within these he did identify several variants, it does appear that he wished to constrain his principal number to five. His Tamil declensions are:

Henriques also identified a five-case paradigm in Tamil, to which he gave the Latinate names: nominative, vocative, accusative, genitive, dative. Barros (1540: ff.11r–12v) had included in his Grammatica an ablative and an instrumental (not morphologically marked in Portuguese):

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: I take much learning from books. And if one says, I take much learning from books with my effort, this noun effort, is in another, seventh, case, which the Romans call ‘effectivus’ (productive). This case is governed by the preposition with, and it embodies the instrument with which we perform something, as in the example above.’]

Henriques did not include an ablative in his Tamil paradigm, though he mentioned such in his discussion: “the ablative ends in -ile or -il, with the vowel or consonant preceding according to the respective declension” (c.1549 [1982]: f.24r). Its use is explained as having a locative function (1982: f.151v):

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 Tolkāppiyam, written in the form of 1,604 short formulaic verses (see e.g., Chevillard 2000; Murugan & Samuel 2001).⁷ According to Tolkāppiyam, Book 2 (collatikāram, on words), Chapter 2 (vēṟṟumaiyiyal, on cases), sutras 62–83, there are eight cases in Tamil, identified in sutra 64 by the common case marker suffixes (and case names in respect of the first, peyar ‘name’, and last, viḷi ‘calling’):

Adopting the Latin-based terminology used by Zvelebil (1982: 9), we may explicate these as:

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 (Tolkaapiyam), borrows the idea that Tamil had to have seven cases plus vocative. Because Sanskrit associative and instrumental cases are identical in form, Tamil has both forms under one rubric, even though the earliest grammarians were uncomfortable with this. (Schiffman 1999: 34; see also Schiffman 2005: 295)

Schiffman is echoing Caldwell’s (1856: 203, 223) construal:

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 (1982: 13) that for the 3rd case,

the marker -oṭu was used, in Old Tamil, to denote three semantic-syntactic relationships: agent[,] instrument and association.

And on the 5th case, he observes that Tolkāppiyam sutra 77, which he translates as, ‘It denotes the nature of a thing in relation to another’, is a “beautiful abstraction”, a definition:

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 (porūuporuḷ), separation …, limitation … and cause. The poru (comparison) is twofold, of similarity, and of contrast. (Zvelebil 1982: 14)

In Arte Tamulica (Panaji, MS M34 f.15, left col., ll.25–29), Balthasar da Costa (1610–1673), a native of Aldea Nova in the diocese of Guarda, and superior of the Jesuit mission in Madurai from 1649, gave a six-case noun paradigm for Tamil: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, vocative and ablative, with the ablative having three functions even though these are morphologically distinct: stative (-iṭattil), instrumental (-āl) and sociative (-oṭe):

And he added “Outros casos ou modos de fal[ar]” [‘other cases or forms of expression’]:

The (compound) terminations -kuṟiccu, -ukkāka and -ai.k-koṇṭu are unnamed, presumably because in Latin their senses are expressed by prepositional or adverbial phrases, not case inflections alone.

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:

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 (Muru 2014: 355).⁹ In the extant parts of his Arte Tamul [Tamil grammar],¹⁰ explicitly a grammar of the spoken language, Aguilar distinguishes four declensions for Tamil, according to a morphophonemic classification – but not that of Henriques – and “partly following the Latin model” (Muru 2014: 370). He delineated an eight-case system, based explicitly on the Sanskrit paradigm, but with subdivisions of the ablative to accommodate the realities of Tamil. Muru (2014: 374–375) has it that Aguilar’s study “goes far beyond the earlier analysis of the Tamil grammar by Henrique Henriques … and of da Costa”, and indeed represents the first extant declensional analysis by a European of the Tamil ‘ablative’ to diverge greatly from the Latin standard.

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,¹¹ but he chooses to provide a hybrid classification which combines Latin criteria with the local grammatical terminology. Furthermore, Aguilar differentiates the ṣaṣthī¹² into local, causative, social and comparative. By doing this, he shows how sensitive he was to the usage of the language. Indeed, he goes beyond the Indian grammatical tradition. In fact, he identifies not only the locative and instrumental case, but he also recognizes: 1) the comitative case which he calls xaxti social, 2) the usage of the locative case in comparative constructions (xaxti comparativo) in Tamil and 3) the ablative used to mark separation which he defines as abl^º partitivo ou separativo. (Muru 2014: 373–374)

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 grammars¹³ were themselves premised on an Indo-European (Sanskrit) model, the Europeans felt that they needed only to expand what they were familiar with in Latin, to embrace the linguistics of Tamil. This was all the more apt, since the missions included clergy from a number of different language backgrounds, but all with a solid grounding in Latin, and the exploitation of this common denominator was an expedient teaching and learning tool for the missioners. Howbeit, as reliance solely on a Latin model gradually came to be felt inadequate to account for the facts of the language, more sophisticated analyses began to creep into the grammars. With respect to the cases, this was particularly apparent in the ablative.

2.2. Later missionary descriptions of the Tamil ablative case

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 Short introduction to the Malabar language (1703 [1672]: 664–665), for example, who noted that “the Malabar Language is very difficult to be learn’d; especially by reason of the vast number of words whereof it consists” and that “the Indians are not so unpolish’d as some Europeans represent them”,¹⁴ cited six cases for Tamil: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, vocative, which he glossed with their Sanskrit-derived Tamil names, and “four sorts of Ablative Cases”:

Baldaeus’s quadripartite classification of the ablative reflected the analysis elaborated by Aguilar, whom he referenced as a source of his own work (Baldaeus 1672: 191).¹⁵ Indeed, Baldaeus (1672) is a partial version of Aguilar’s Arte. However, as Muru (2014: 363) notes, we do not know how far this sole extant copy of the Arte is representative of Aguilar’s work, and what Baldaeus may have changed when he copied or used it.¹⁶

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 gravitætische und oratorische Sprache/die sehr angenehm zu ho͑ren ist/wenn man sie langsam redet/und deutlich ausspricht. Sie ist dabey eine sehr nette und Wortreiche Sprache/eben als etwan die teutsche und Lateinische Sprache seyn mag. Ihre Wo͑rter sind schwer zu behalten und auszusprechen; aber nach den grammaticalischen præceptis ist sie gantz leichte. (Ziegenbalg 1713 [1709]: 116–117)

[Tamil is] a peculiar Language … full of Gravity and pathos: It touches the Ear agreeably, particularly if a Man has a good knack of Delivery, and takes time to pronounce it with Deliberation. It is also very exact and copious, as the German or Latin are. Its Words are somewhat difficult to remember and to pronounce; yet very easily to be learned by the help of Grammar Rules. (Ziegenbalg 1717: 9)¹⁷

We may note that peculiar (as a translation of eigen ‘distinctive, particular’) here has the sense of ‘distinguished in nature or attributes; particular, special’, and in no way connotes ‘strange, odd’. Gone is the epithet barbar-, Tamil pronunciation now “touches the Ear agreeably”; no longer, moreover, is the language deficient in vocabulary (Cartilha 1554: “pobre de vocabolos”). For Ziegenbalg, Tamil was explicitly on a par with both his mother tongue, German, and the quintessential European classical language, Latin. And by grammaticalischen præcepta (“Grammar Rules”), he was no doubt alluding to the regularity of the declensional and conjugational paradigms in Tamil – in this, he echoed Henriques (Županov 2003: 124–125).

In his Grammatica Damulica [Tamil grammar] (1716: 15),¹⁸ Ziegenbalg identified four declensions, unequivocally related to those of Latin: “Omnia Nomina substantiva in hac lingua æque declinantur & flectuntur, ac in lingua latine” [‘All nouns in this language are declined and inflected just as in Latin’].¹⁹ His declensions were determined exclusively on phonetic criteria, viz.,

He divided the ablative into three: locative (ablativus loci), instrumental (ablativus instrumentalis) and sociative (ablativus sociativus), but his paradigms included several subdivisions of each, identified by suffixes: for the locative ablative he cited -e, -il, -ile, -iṭattile, -uḷḷe (inessive); for the instrumental ablative, -āl and -āle; and for the sociative ablative, -oṭe, -uṭaṉe, -aippāttu, -aikkuṟiccu, -ukkāka, -aikkoṇṭu. His analysis echoed that of his Jesuit predecessors, but he included -il(e) both as an illative and prosecutive (‘in’) and elative (‘from’) locative, and expanded the sociative to incorporate those forms which Costa had acknowledged as “outros casos” but did not name. Ziegenbalg was aware of Tolkāppiyam, Naṉṉūl, and other Tamil grammatical works, but as he found them “hard beyond all measure” (Sweetman & Ilakkuvan 2012: 11), his main reference appears to have been Costa’s Arte Tamulica.²⁰

A contemporary – and outspoken religious adversary (see Hough 1845: 199–200) – of Ziegenbalg was the Madurai-based French Jesuit, Louis-Noël de Bourzes (1673–1735), who made a considerable study of the language and culture of the Tamils (see Selvi 2014; Xavier Raj 1996: 6–9). In his extensive Essay du dictionnaire tamul françois [Pilot Tamil French dictionary] (1724), which is a French–Tamil dictionary, he included at the headword Cas de grammaire [‘Grammatical case’], identifications of the case suffixes which “Les poetes expriment … par les particules suivantes” [‘poets express … by the following particles’]:

aiya. C’est l’accusatif./il. l’instrumental. kule le datif./iṉ. le genitif. …/atuve. le possessif. …/kaṇ le mitoyen

[‘aiya. This is the accusative./il. the instrumental. kule. the dative./iṉ. the genitive. …/atuve. the possessive. …/kaṇ the contiguous (i.e., locative)’].

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.’] (Chevillard 1992: 85)

In his Grammatica Latino-Tamulica [Latin–Tamil grammar] (1738, written in c.1728), he observed that in the native grammars there were no distinctions of declension, and thus what were considered by Europeans to be declensions were rather morphophonological modifications on a single paradigm (as indeed Costa had already recognized).²¹ Beschi (1738: 31) therefore suggested a single-declension model with eight cases, based on Naṉṉūl: nominative, vocative, accusative, genitive, dative, stative (ablative), instrumental (ablative) and sociative (ablative):

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 ai, vocatur aiyeṉṉumvēṟṟumai, casus ai dictus; et sic de ceteris: excepto tamen nominativo, quem peyar, id est, nomen vocant; et vocativo, quem dicunt viḷivēṟṟumai, id est, casus vocandi, à verbo viḷikkiṟatu, vocare.

[‘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 ai, is called aiyeṉṉumvēṟṟumai, ‘the ai case’, and so on for the rest, except for the nominative, however, which they call peyar ‘name’, and the vocative, which they term viḷivēṟṟumai, that is, ‘the calling case’, from the verb viḷikkiṟatu ‘to call’.’]

He noted that two of the eight cases “ad ablativum reduci possunt” [‘may be reduced to the ablative’: Beschi, tr. Horst 1806: 28], thus giving three ‘ablatives’:²²

Beschi (1738: 32) analyzed as verbal suffixes three further terminations which other European missionaries had considered to be separate case-endings (e.g., Costa’s “outros casos”, or Ziegenbalg’s subtypes):

Addunt aliqui tres alios casus, quos ablativos vocant: scilicet malaikkāka, malaiyaikkuṟittu, malaiyaikkoṇṭu. Attamen omninò impropriè istæ phrases adnumerantur ablativo, quod certè Tamulenses in suâ Grammaticâ non faciunt.

[‘Some add three further cases, which they call ablatives: thus, mountain-ABLATIVE_kkāka, mountain-ABLATIVE_aikkuṟittu, mountain-ABLATIVE_aikkoṇṭu. However, it is altogether inappropriate that these phrases should be counted as ablatives, and certainly the Tamils do not do so in their Grammar.’]

(His reference is to Naṉṉūl.) His analysis of these endings is:

Beschi (1822: 11–13) had added what is effectively a ninth case, although he rejected this term as an analysis:

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 the oblique. This is not the uninflected noun, neither is it any case of it; for it differs from the nominative form, and is frequently used by itself, without any casual termination. The form of the oblique is not the same in all nouns, but varies … All nouns, except those in am, and some of those in u … form their oblique by adding iṉ to the nominative. … the termination iṉ is by no means a form of the genitive; for, in the higher dialect, this case ends in atu … [T]he oblique … is very frequently employed in this dialect, it’s [sic] uses are: First, in declining nouns … Secondly. In forming adjectives from nouns … Thirdly. To denote possession … Fourthly. In expressing the qualities of the mind, or the members of the body … Fifthly. In expressing the time in which any person or thing exists or has existed, or in which any thing is or was done … Sixthly. In expressing the place of abode … Seventhly. The oblique in ttu is used for the ablative in il … It is used also in comparison … [T]he oblique has sometimes the same form as the nominative.

In his chapter on syntax, Beschi added that the stative in -il was also used to express comparison.²⁶ This was echoed by Dominique de Valence (1696–1778), superior of the French Capuchin mission in Puducherry in the 1730s, in Dictionaire et gramaire francois tamovl [French–Tamil dictionary and grammar] (c.1734),²⁷ where the suffix -il is cited as an ablative with three uses:

1^er … qui correspond proprement a notre ablatif dans … malaiyil irukkam pulikaḷ les Tigres sont dans les montagnes

[‘1st … which corresponds to our ablative in … mountain-in be-PRES.-3RD PERS. SING. NEUTER tiger-PLUR. The tigers are in the mountains’]

2^e cet ablatif exprime le mouvement de lieu … marattil viḻunta paḻam le fruit qui est tombe de l’arbre

[‘2nd This ablative expresses motion from a place … tree-from fall-PAST REL. PART. fruit the fruit which fell from the tree’]

3^e 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 il … atileyitu nallatu ceci est meilleur que cela.

[‘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 il … that-than-this good-3RD PERS. SING. NEUTER this is better than that’]

De Valence’s second ablative is Beschi’s “Ablativus instrumenti seu causæ” in -āl,

… d’ou il est pris particulierement pour expliquer la cause ou efficient, ou materiel, ou instrumentelle, ou même conditionelle … ivaṉāl keṭṭeṉ par luy ou a cause de luy je suis perdu ou je suis malheureux. … de la cause materielle mamarattāṟ ceyata cilai statue faite de bois &c. de la cause instrumentelle āṇiyāl aṟainatāṉ il a attaché avec des cloux.

[‘which is taken to express the cause or efficient, or material, or instrumental, or even conditional; he-by bad-1ST PERS. SING. through him or because of him I am lost or I am unhappy … the material cause wood-by do-PAST REL. PART. statue statue made of wood etc.; instrumental cause nail-with hit-PAST-3RD PERS. SING. MASC. he fastened with nails.’]

Beschi’s third ablative, “Ablativus societatis et aliquando instrumenti”, de Valence explained thus:

Le 3^e ablatif. oṭu vaut proprement notre ablatif de societé avec ex. avaṉoṭu vanteṉ je suis venu avec luy &c. on explique aussi la cause par cet ablatif, et on s’en sert quasi indifferemment avec l’ablatif en āl p. ex. … āṇiyāl ou āṇiyoṭu aṟaintāṉ il a attache avec des cloux. outre cela cet ablatif explique la profession … āstiyoṭu iruntāṉ il fut riche; ou avec des richesses_…

[‘The 3rd ablative, oṭu is rightly our sociative ablative with, e.g., he-with come-PAST-1ST PERS. SING. I came with him etc. The cause is also expressed by this ablative, and it is used interchangeably with the ablative in āl, e.g., … nail-with_āl or with_oṭu hit-PAST-3RD PERS. SING. MASC. he fastened with nails. Apart from that, this ablative expresses the profession … wealth-with be-PAST-3RD PERS. SING. MASC. he was rich; or with riches …’]

Pierre de la Lane, on the other hand, seemingly rather strangely, noted in his attributed work, Grammaire pour apprendre la langue tamoul [Grammar for learning the Tamil language] (1728: 11),

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:

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 -ile. Ex. Il est a la maison, a la ville, dans le Païs vīṭaṭle. paṭṭaṇattile. cimaiyile. iṟukkirān. … Tous les mêmes noms encore quj répondent a la question – Unde se mettent a l’ablatif avec les 2 prepositions – yile – iruntu jointes ensemble. Ex. Il vient de la maison de la ville du Royaume de . . vīṭaṭleyiruntu, paṭṭaṇattile yiruntu . . cimaiyile yiruntu. vantāṉ.

[‘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 -ile. E.g., He is at home, in town, in the country house-in, town-in, country-in be-PRES. 3RD PERS. SING. MASC. … And all the same nouns which answer the question Whence? are put into the ablative with the two prepositions yile and iruntu joined together. E.g., He has come from the house, from the town, from the kingdom of – house-in-be-PAST PART., town-in-be-PAST PART., country-in-be-PAST PART. come-PAST-3RD PERS. SING. MASC.’]

De la Lane, then, identified the endings of the Tamil ablative not as inflections, but derivational postpositions (which he termed “prepositions”).

In A grammar of the Tamil language (1836), Carl Rhenius (1790–1838), from Graudenz (then in Prussia, now Grudziądz in Poland), who served as a Protestant pastor in Tirunelveli district, at first with the Church Missionary Society, and later with the German Evangelical Mission, continued the convention, from Naṉṉūl, of eight cases, including three ablatives, with the mention of iruntu (de la Lane’s “preposition”) as a particle:

The third case is our ablative and is (1.) instrumental, by adding to the nominative āl … and (2.) social, by adding oṭu or uṭanē … The fifth case is an ablative of separation, or motion, and adds il or in … very often the particle iruntu or niṉṟu is added to this case … The seventh case is an ablative of place, and is expressed in poetry by 28 terminations;²⁸ but in common Tamil only il, iṭattil are in use … (Rhenius, Abridgement, 1845: 16–17)

This analysis of three ablatives was widespread, and is found in a range of non-linguistic sources of the period: e.g., Voyage dans l’Indostan [Journey in Hindustan] (1807: 299), by Jean-Charles Perrin (1754–1851) of the Société des Missions étrangères:

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.’]

La Mission du Maduré [The Madurai Mission] (1847: 108), by Joseph Bertrand (1801–1884), superior of the Madurai mission in the early 1840s:

Les déclinaisons renferment huit cas, distingués entre eux par les terminaisons (comme en latin); outre l’ablatif désinant en il, qui est l’ablatif de lieu, le tamoul a un deuxième ablatif en âl, qui répond à l’ablatif de cause ou d’instrument (a ou ab en latin), et l’ablatif en ôdhou, qui répond à l’ablatif de compagnie (cum en latin), ce qui délivre la phrase tamoule de cette infinité de particules qui gênent et embarrassent notre style français.

[‘The declensions contain eight cases, distinguished one from the other by endings (as in Latin); apart from the ablative in il, which is the locative ablative, Tamil has a second ablative in âl, which equates to the ablative of cause or instrument (Latin a or ab), and the ablative in ôdhou which equates to the sociative ablative (Latin cum), thus relieving the Tamil sentence of that infinity of particles which cramp and embrangle our style in French.’]

And The Bible of every land (1848: 114), by the London publisher, Samuel Bagster (1772–1851):

Tamil nouns have eight cases, three of which are ablatives, and are distinguished as local, causal, and social ablatives.

Following Beschi, Rhenius (1845: 20–21) added an oblique, which he referred to as a case:

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, iṉ, as: pulliṉvaṇṇam, the colour of the grass²⁹ … The nominative is sometimes used for this oblique case, as: paṟkaṭal, the sea of milk.

The French missionaries Louis-Marie Mousset (1808–1888) and Louis-Savinien Dupuis (1806–1874), in their Dictionnaire tamoul–français [Tamil–French dictionary] (1855), also explained that the oblique -iṉ is a marker of the locative (7th case), comparative (ablative, 5th case) and genitive (6th case: in the spoken language: recall that Beschi had noted that -iṉ was in no way a genitive in the “higher dialect”), and a generalized oblique:

iṉ; … 2^e terminaison de l’ablatif de lieu et de comparaison, qui signifie de, dans, que, comme; Ex. malaiyiṉvīḻaruvi, ruisseau qui tombe de la montagne. 3^e particule … qui forme le génitif vulgaire et l’oblique, et s’insère entre le nom et sa terminaison dans tous les cas. Ex. pūviṉmaṇam l’odeur de fleur; malayiṉai pour malaiyai.

[‘iṉ; … 2. ending of the locative and comparative ablative, which denotes of, from, than, as; e.g., mountain-from… 3. Particle … which forms the lower-register genitive and the oblique, and always occurs between the noun and its ending in all the cases, e.g., flower-of scent …; mountain-OBLIQUE-ACCUS. for mountain-ACCUS.’]

They also cited -il as a locative (7th case) and comparative (5th case):

il; … 2^e terminaison de l’ablatif de lieu et de comparaison. Ex. ūriliruntāṉ il était dans la ville; aḻaliṟpiṟaḻmaṇi pierrerie qui brille comme le feu; pāmpiṉiṟkaṭitutēḷ l’aiguillon du scorpion est plus sensible que la dent du serpent.

[‘il; … 2. ending of the locative and comparative ablative, e.g., town-in be-PAST-3RD PERS. SING. MASC. he was in the town; fire-as sparkle precious-stone – precious stone which sparkles like fire; snake-OBLIQUE-than greatly scorpion – the scorpion’s sting is sharper than the serpent’s tooth.’]

Another lexicographer of the period, the Lutheran, Johann Peter Rottler (1749–1836), in Dictionary of the Tamil and English languages (1834: 184), also quoting -il as polysemous, gave precedence to the comparative and elative (5th case) over the locative (7th) case:

il; sub. 1. the same as iṭam, a place … 4. the fifth case in Nouns: aintaṉurupu; pāmpiṉiṟkaṭitutēḷ, the sting of a scorpion is more severe than the bite of a snake. malaiyilvīḻaruvi, the river falls from the hill … 5. the seventh case in Nouns: ēḻaṉurupu: ūriliruntāṉ, he was in town

Julien Vinson (1843–1926), born into a French family living in Puducherry,³⁰ author of Manuel de la langue tamoule [Manual of the Tamil language] (1903), the first Tamil grammar in French, with extensive examples from Tamil texts, identified -il and -iṉ as comparatives, with -il also as locative and -iṉ instrumental and oblique (1903: 76–77):

Les grammairiens tamouls qui ont copié servilement ceux du nord ont attribué à leur langue un ablatif en … il ou … in´. Mais … il est proprement le locatif et … in´ l’oblique ou la forme adjective. L’ablatif « de, ex » se rend par une périphrase, à l’aide des gérondifs nin´d´u « s’étant tenu, se tenant » ou … iruntu « ayant été, s’étant placé, étant »: « je viens de la maison » se dira … vîṭṭil iruntu varugir´ên´ … Parmi les acceptions particulières que peuvent prendre certains suffixes, l’oblique en … in´ et le locatif en … il servent certainement pour l’ablatif: … taleiyin´ ijinta mayir « cheveu tombé de la tête » et nous ajouterons qu’ils s’emploient aussi pour remplacer le que comparatif: … adan´it´ périd’ itu « ceci est grand par rapport à cela, est plus grand que cela »; que le … in´ joue aussi le rôle d’instrumental: … pon´n´in´âyakuḍam «un vase fait d’or »; enfin que le même … in´ prend le sens du « comme » comparatif.

[‘The Tamil grammarians who slavishly copied those of the North,³¹ attributed to their language an ablative in … il or … in´. But … il is more correctly the locative and … in´ the oblique or adjectival form. The ablative ‘from’ is expressed by periphrasis, through the gerunds nin´d´u ‘having been held, holding’ or … iruntu ‘having been, standing, being’: ‘I am coming from the house’ will be … vîṭṭil iruntu varugir´ên´ (house-from be-PAST PART. come-PRES.-1ST PERS. SING.) … Among the particular senses which certain suffixes can have, the oblique … in´ and the locative … il do indeed mark the ablative: … taleiyin´ ijinta mayir (head-from fall-PAST REL PART. hair) ‘hair fallen from the head’, and we would add that they are also used for the comparative than: … adan´it´ périd´ itu (that-than big this) ‘this is bigger with respect to that, is bigger than that’; that … in´ also represents the instrumental: … pon´n´in´âyakuḍam (gold-by pot) ‘a pot made of gold’; and that the same … in´ has the sense of the comparative as.’]

In English and Tamil dictionary (1852) by Levi Spaulding (1791–1873), a Presbyterian evangelist in Sri Lanka of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, we find these headwords and entries:

• Cäse, s., … in grammar, vêttumaiyurubu, vêttumai

• Nomʹin-a-tive, s., … peyarvêttumai

• Ac-cūsʹa-tive, (case,) s., aivêttumai; iṙaṇdâmvêttumai

• Dāʹtive (a case), s., nângâmvêttumaiyurubu; ku-urubu; ku-vêttumai

• Lōcʹa-tive (case), s., idavêttumai

• Ablative, (cases), a., il; âl; odu; ôdu; udan; idam; uḷ

Here, at the headword Ablative, the term is indicated as ‘cases’ not ‘case’, and is not translated (as are nominative, accusative, dative and locative), but is glossed by a selection of unannotated suffixes, which, notably, do not include -iṉ. Similarly, G. U. Pope (1820–1908), an Anglican missionary, later lecturer in Tamil and Telugu at the University of Oxford, in A handbook of the ordinary dialect of the Tamil language (1904 [1855]: 32) omitted -iṉ as an ablative marker: