Tamil

The classical language of the Tamil country at India’s southern tip, and the oldest continuously attested member of the Dravidian family: cave inscriptions in the Tamil-Brahmi script begin around the third to second century BCE, and the Sangam corpus, some two thousand four hundred poems of love and war compiled from the early centuries CE, stands at the head of one of the world’s longest unbroken literary traditions. The atlas’s window closes at 1453 with the language in full medieval flower, the Chola empire’s inscriptions behind it and the great commentators at work; Tamil is the rare case in this collection of a classical language whose speakers simply never stopped.

The entries render Tamil in its own script as the manuscript and print tradition standardized it, with the romanization of the Madras Tamil Lexicon: the retroflex ḻ of the language’s own name, the alveolar ṟ and ṉ that Tamil distinguishes from their dental neighbors, and long vowels marked with macrons. Sangam-era poems survive through that continuous manuscript tradition rather than on contemporary stone, so the forms here are cited from the received texts; where a name is a loan from Sanskrit, Tamil’s phonology reshapes it at the door, voicing lost, clusters broken, the initial h- of the northern word simply dropped.

@misc{onomastikon-tamil,
  author = {Rajagopal, Shriram},
  title = {Tamil},
  year = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://onomastikon.org/languages/tamil}},
  note = {Onomastikon: A Digital Atlas of Ancient Names}
}