The study is focused on Confession manuals, including two bilingual dictionaries (Tamil-Portuguese and Portuguese-Tamil) and a glossary of religious terms.The Confession manual which to be analysed is the Tamil translation by Henrique Henriques SJ (1520–1600) entitled Confessionairo, கொமபெசியொனாய்ரு (Kompeciyonāyru - “Confession Manual”) and printed in Cochin in 1580. This is followed by an examination of the relationship between the conceptions found in the Tolkāppiyam (and its first commentator, Iḷampūraṇar) and those found in later metrical treatises such as the Yāpparuṅkalam (and its commentary). Those limbs are subdivided into several groups, which are examined in this article, particularly with a view to matching them with phenomena attested in the existing poetical corpus and to assessing how naturally they fit the Tamil language. The oldest treatise available is the Tolkāppiyam, which gives in its penultimate chapter, the Ceyyuḷiyal, a characterization of the thirty-four “limbs” (uṟuppu) of poetical compositions. As a consequence, we observe the simultaneous transmission of a poetical corpus, progressively enriched, and of a series of grammatical treatises. That refined language would be used for the metrical composition (yāppu) by poets of a variety of poetical texts (ceyyuḷ) falling under different genres, the dominant one being pāṭṭu “song/verse”. The main purpose of that collective endeavour seems to have been the detailed characterization of a refined language, which was possibly one of the components in a diglossic situation (analogous to that of Tamil today).
ABSTRACT: In writing a history of the Tamil Grammatical Tradition, one must try to make explicit the genesis, the constituent elements and the purpose of an ensemble that was gradually put together during the First Millenium of the Common Era.
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