A Historical Grammar of Tamil: Noun Morphology

History is essentially the study of the events of the past integral to human society. Language is the creation of the human society endowed with a fairly long history. Among the languages, some have developed written systems while others haven’t. The written systems in languages witness widely varying dates of advent in the history of languages. Languages with written systems have the advantage of written records, documentation. These written records stand useful to understand the historical development of the given language. Linguistic history is primarily classifiable into internal and external history. The former deals with linguistic changes in the language system embracing phonetics, morphology, syntax and semantics, while the latter is the domain of political, social and cultural phenomena which entail interlanguage contact and the consequent give-and-take called borrowings. These borrowings constitute one of the major mechanisms of language change. The present book by Prof. S. V. Shanmugam belongs to this category albeit limiting itself to noun morphology with its gender number-suffixes, inflectional increments, personal pronouns and names of directions. Be that as it may, this is the first book on noun morphology which is part of the internal history of the Tamil language. It should provide the impetus for similar studies of the internal history of the Tamil language.