A tree-guided tour of the Eḻuttatikāram

Accepté pour publication dans Pandanus [ISSN 1802-7997], parution prévue en octobre 2010Tree-related vocabulary figures prominently inside the TE (Eḻuttatikāram of the Tolkāppiyam), an ancient treatise dealing with the phonetics and morphophonology of Tamil, but attempting a complete botanical identification of that vocabulary is a difficult task (not attempted here). This article, examining how the individual items inside that vocabulary are dealt with, and how their treatment fits in with the global organization of the TE, aims at providing insights on the nature of those items. They are not basically free forms, but bound forms (or stems), to be concatenated with other elements, in order to obtain the attested linguistic forms, at the end of a derivational process of which the TE is the explicit formulation. This in turns provides an insight into the way the first grammatical description of Tamil was made, probably on the basis of an analysis of existing complex expressions. The language, having thus been analysed and equipped with a grammar, was then on its way to becoming a normalized language, more suitable for literary expression than a language without a grammar. Later grammarians would elaborate on that first step, in a long “domestication” process of language by grammar, the results of which are still visible today, whenever the tamed centamiḻ standard is preferred over more spontaneous dialectal usage