In news- The Minister of State for Education released the Hindi translation of Tolkāppiyam and the Kannada translations of 9 books of Classical Tamil literature recently.
About Tolkāppiyam-
- Tolkappiyam is the most ancient extant Tamil grammar text and the oldest extant long work of Tamil literature.
- It is a comprehensive text on grammar, and includes sutras on orthography, phonology, etymology, morphology, semantics, prosody, sentence structure and the significance of context in language.
- The surviving manuscripts of the Tolkappiyam consists of three books, each with nine chapters, with a cumulative total of 1,612 sutras in the nūṛpā meter.
- The three books are -the Eluttatikaram (“Eluttu” meaning “letter, phoneme”), the Sollatikaram (“Sol” meaning “Sound, word”) and the Porulatikaram (“Porul” meaning “subject matter”, i.e. prosody, rhetoric, poetics).
- There is no firm evidence to assign the authorship of this treatise to any one author.
- Tholkapiyam, some traditionally believe, was written by a single author named Tholkappiyar, a disciple of Vedic sage Agastya mentioned in the Rigveda (1500–1200 BCE).
- Some in the Tamil tradition place the text in the mythical second sangam, variously in 1st millennium BCE or earlier.
- According to the traditional legend, the original grammar was called Agathiam written down by sage Agastya, but it went missing after a great deluge.
Source: PIB
