Search

The Ponniyin Selvan (Ponni’s Son) novels by Kalki, serialized from 1950 to 1954 and set during the medieval ages in the Tamil country against the backdrop of a power struggle between and within the two South Indian dynasties of the Cholas and the Pandyas, during the reign of Parantaka II (also known as Sundara Chola) roughly from 958 CE to 973 CE, represent a format of the historical novel that addressed the post-independence anxieties about language, tradition and regional identity within popular Tamil print culture in the 1940s and 1950s. Kalki’s historical romances were written amidst specific socio-political movements that gained momentum in the early and mid-twentieth century. This article situates the revivalist and reformist agendas espoused by nationalists such as Kalki in the twentieth century within the context of the ideological shifts and turbulences in Tamil political and public spheres concerning Tamil language and literary history, through an analysis of the Ponniyin Selvan series as a representative text of this shifting context of Tamil identity formation, as a popular historical novel and a collective memory text. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Part-of-Speech (POS) tagging is one of the popular Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. It is also considered to be a preliminary task for other NLP applications such as speech recognition, machine translation, and sentiment analysis. A few works have been published on POS tagging for the Tamil language. However, the performance of the POS tagger with unknown words is not explored in the literature. The appearance of unknown words is a frequently occurring problem in POS tagging and makes it a challenging task. In this paper, we propose a deep learning-based POS tagger for Tamil using Bi-directional Long Short Term Memory (BLSTM). The performance of the POS tagger was evaluated using known and unknown words. The POS tagger with regular word-level embeddings produces 99.83 and 92.46% accuracies for all known and 63.21% unknown words. It clearly shows that the accuracy decreases when the number of unknown words increases. To improve the performance of the POS tagger with unknown words, the proposed BLSTM model that uses word-level, character-level and pre-trained word embeddings. Test results of this model show a 2.57% improvement for 63.21% of unknown words, with an accuracy of 95.03%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the impact of Tamil diglossia on cognitive test administration. It raises concerns about false-positive errors in diagnosing cognitive impairments when using standardized tests with culturally diverse individuals. The study focuses on the use of two dialects of Tamil and how they affect test performance. The research suggests that using the local dialect may lead to better performance on immediate memory tests, but also emphasizes the importance of using the preferred language of the test takers to obtain accurate results. The study calls for culturally equitable tests and further research on the impact of diglossia on test understanding. [Extracted from the article]

Background: Research on global coherence in neurotypical aging has predominantly focused on different methods of elicitation and their impact on age. The use of structured versus unstructured discourse tasks can have varying effects on global coherence. Comparative studies investigating this effect within Tamil language-speaking populations are scarce. This study seeks to address this gap by examining global coherence in structured and unstructured tasks among speakers of Tamil language. Aim: This study aimed to identify any significant differences in the global coherence of discourse, as measured through structured (picture description) and unstructured (conversation) tasks, in middle-aged and older neurotypical individuals across ages and genders. Method: Thirty Tamil-speaking individuals participated in the study, which included 15 middle-aged adults (aged 44–59 years) and 15 older adults (aged 60–80 years), with an equal number of males and females. Discourse samples were audio recorded using structured (picture description) and unstructured (conversational discourse) tasks. The picture description task included describing a single picture (of a birthday scene) and a sequential picture stimulus (depicting an argument event). The conversational task consisted of two topics of conversation (family and work) with the investigator. Each discourse task lasted for at least a minute. The recorded samples were transcribed verbatim and analyzed using a 4-point Global Coherence Rating Scale. Results: Participants exhibited significant differences, with the unstructured discourse task having a significantly higher global coherence rating (p ≤ 0.05) than both structured discourse tasks. The varying cognitive demands, functional purposes, and contextual factors across various discourse elicitation tasks could be attributed to these differences. No significant differences were observed in the coherence ratings between middle-aged and older adults or between genders. Conclusion: The method used to elicit discourse and the type of discourse need to be considered when exploring global coherence measures. The current study has important methodological implications for the coherence analysis of the Tamil-speaking population in both structured and unstructured tasks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research delves into the intricate world of botanical nomenclature within Tamil culture, shedding light on the linguistic transparency and cultural significance embedded within plant names. Through an analysis of five diverse plant species, including vēlipparutti (Pergularia daemia), pīḷai (Aerva lanata), tumpai ceṭi (Leucas aspera), āṭātōṭai (Justicia adhatoda), and the toṭṭāṟ curuṅki (Mimosa pudica), this study explores the factors contributing to the naming of plants and the transparency of these names in the Tamil language. Each plant's name reflects not only its physical attributes but also its cultural context, highlighting the rich tapestry of traditions and observations woven into Tamil botanical terminology. The transparency of plant names in Tamil is a remarkable feature that facilitates communication and understanding among speakers. These names often provide vivid descriptions of the plants, allowing individuals to easily identify and recognize them in their natural environment. Through linguistic analysis and cultural interpretation, this research provides valuable insights into the intricate relationship between language, culture, and nature in the Tamil-speaking regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research article delves into the metaphorical extensions within agricultural lexemes in the Tamil language, unraveling a rich tapestry of linguistic evolution and cultural interplay. The study explores how metaphors, rooted in the foundational activity of agriculture, serve as powerful conduits for expressing diverse facets of human experience. The metaphorical journey spans lexical items such as talaiyeṭu, kaḷaiyeṭu, allakkai, maṭaimāṟṟu, and vaṭikāl, revealing the dynamic interplay between language, culture, and agricultural practices. This analysis highlights the complexity of language evolution, where metaphors rooted in specific cultural practices offer a unique lens through which individuals express and conceptualize abstract ideas. The metaphorical extension of agricultural lexemes serves as a testament to the dynamic interplay between language, culture, and human experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tamil television serials have the potential to elicit a wide variety of emotions in viewers. Emotional control and expression change as individuals age, and this change is interrelated in various ways. Positive or negative emotions, when put into practice by regulating the emotions associated with health, can result in an increase or decrease in lifespan during successful ageing. This study explores the relationship between emotional well-being and prosperous ageing in Tamil television serials among older adults. An exploratory method was adopted to understand the connection between Tamil television serials and emotional well-being for successful ageing in Tamil Nadu (a southern state of India). Fourteen older adults over 50 who watch Tamil television mega-serials from Tamil Nadu were recruited for in-depth interviews. Three themes emerged from the thematic analysis: emotional connection, life satisfaction, fortitude and ageism among older adults. The findings suggest that Tamil television serials provide emotional engagement, companionship and life satisfaction for older adults, contributing to successful ageing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This resource description explores a web-assisted learning and teaching approach for Tamil facilitated by the Penn Language Center. Tamil is an ancient language spoken predominantly in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka. The language has significant cultural and linguistic relevance. However, due to limited resources and geographical constraints, access to high-quality Tamil language instruction has often been challenging for learners outside Tamil-speaking regions. To address these challenges, the Penn Language Center developed the WALTT program, which integrates web-based technologies into Tamil language learning and teaching. This web resource description aims to examine the structure of the syllabi in detail. Overall, this resource description aims to decode the presence of web-assisted learning resources in the field of Tamil language education, as well as provide valuable resources for the broader community of web-assisted language learning and teaching practitioners and beginners of the language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Vairamuthu, a multifaceted poet, writer and literary man among contemporary songwriters, was born in the village of Vadugapatti, Theni district. He is a prolific writer of poems, short stories, novels, and haiku poems. He has attained the pinnacle of fame in the field of literature and art after receiving the prestigious awards of Padma Shri, Padma Bhushan and Sahitya Akademi. He is well known for using common language in simple words that even the common people can understand. Being a poet, he used self and scientific ideas in most of his works. He also used poetic language to polish his works. His works contain a lot of different messages filled with introspective ideas and scientific ideas. One can see the ideas of his works include scientific messages and personal ideas. As a rule, a poet will reflect people's lives and respect their feelings; he has created the real lifestyles of people in his works. He has created the life of fishermen in the novel “Thaneer Desam”, the life of a peasant in the novel “Kallikatu Ithikasam”, and the plight of a woman abandoned by her husband in the novel “Karuvachi Kavyam”. He has depicted the lives of folk artists in the novel “Oru Porkalamaun Irandu Pookkalum”. Vairamuthu’s works not only contain feelings and emotions but also self and scientific concepts that reveal original facts. By exchanging knowledge he has created real works of art by mixing basic scientific messages about land, water and air with inner love in his works. This article examines the messages that are created with the concepts of self and science in his works.

This paper addresses the unique challenges a translator would have when translating a text from a postcolonial country, especially one that has significance amongst the language speakers, such as Cilapattikaram. This paper compares three English translations of Cilapattikaram, a centuries-old Tamil poem that has an undeniable significance among the Tamil-speaking population. By analyzing three English translations of Cilapattikaram, done in the 1930s, 1960s, and 1990s, respectively, the paper examines how translation situated in the political space of decolonization and regional identity affects the text for a better understanding of the dilemmas of the translator and the effect of translation has on the meanings of the text. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Linguists today presuppose that for both description/analysis and comparison of languages, there is a substantial set of universal crosslinguistic categories. In the same way, in the grammaticisation of non-European languages, missionaries took the grammatical categories elaborated for Latin as a set of universal crosslinguistic categories. One could assume that they fell into the trap of transferring time-tested terminology from traditional Latin grammar adapting it to the description of a language with rather different structural properties without really capturing its 'genius'. Even if this assumption may certainly be true to some extent, it does not present the whole picture and it does not do justice to the efforts missionaries made in describing new languages. Therefore, focusing on how missionaries understood and described the Tamil relative clause and relativiser marker, this paper aims to discuss the tension arising in grammatical descriptions between language-particular categories and crosslinguistic conceptual transfer. The paper thus demonstrates how missionaries did not limit their accounts to the transfer of a priori grammatical categories, tailored for Latin and applied to Tamil, but rather how they refined their descriptions through a crosslinguistic conceptual transfer that may be considered the first step towards comparative concepts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on various aspects of Tamil language and literature, based on the author's personal research and understanding. The topics covered include the purpose and scope of the article; the Tamil script and its continued use as both written and spoken language; and an elaborate introduction to Tamil grammars, with a focus on Tolkappiyam and its presentation of linguistic and literary aspects of Tamil.

Over-the-top (OTT) platform is basically working with the use of internet services with all communication electronic gadgets such as smart phones, tablets, smart TV, and desktop. The Digital online streaming Platform OTT (Over-the-top) providing television and film content in different languages over the internet extensively which is available across the globe today at the request. OTT platform such as Netflix, Amazon prime video, Disney plus, and HBO are famous in foreign countries nearly two decade ago, but in India it got popularise during the COVID-19 pandemic. The total lockdown of cinema theatres/halls during the covid pandemic paved way to develop the indigenous OTT platforms such as Sun nxt, hoichoi, aha, koode, stage, cityshor, chaupal, planet marathi, olly plus Manorama max, VOOT, SonyLIV, and Disney+ Hotstar, etc., which are acquiring films and video contents in different Indian languages including four southern languages in order to attract customers from tier-two and tier-three areas. Due to the non-accessibility of theatres and lack of entertainment, people totally turn towards the video contents of OTT platforms during COVID period. Theatrical pictures attracted crowds in almost all cities, towns and villages became binge users of OTT. Basically the different vernacular language OTT content is to suit the requirements of the individual consumer. According to the Federation of Indian Chamber of Commerce and Industry (FICCI) recent analysis, in 2020 the regional languages OTT (over-the-top) video content is 27% will be expected to double in 2024. All OTT platforms have realised that in order to remain relevant across India, they must both purchase and generate unique content for regional audiences. Now most platforms have been looking to grow their audience by purchasing and developing content in several regional languages. As a result, OTT platforms now are expanded to small YouTube producers or content creators to form their video content libraries in order to grow their subscriber base. Nakkalites is one of the leading Indian Tamil YouTube media channel that operates in the space along with Black Sheep (BS Value) and formed first independent OTT Platform by end of 2020 exclusively for Tamil language, which provides Tamil classic films, web series and has about one million subscribers. The preferences of OTT contents are determined by the preferences of an individual in which the OTT platforms are unique. Binge-watching is a relatively a new behaviour pattern in recent time. The study focuses on the understanding of content strategy and challenges of the content creators. The qualitative study is used to collect data through an indepth interview method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The narrow genre of devotional films in India follows a regular template - a combination of theophanic interventions, bhakti (devotional) worship and didactic narratives. Thiruvilayadal (The Divine Play, Akkamappettai Paramasivan Nagarajan, IN 1965), a film in Tamil (a language spoken across South and East Asia by a large diaspora), was long considered a devotional movie that celebrated the God Shiva. However, a close analysis shows that the movie subverts the darshan concept (viewing) in a Hindu devotional film. Though it may appear to be a film about Puranic (mythic) Hindu gods, the subtle subtext reduces heavenly entities to supplicatory positions in relation to a cornerstone of identity in the post-independence Dravidianist Tamil State - Tamil language. This understanding of Thiruvilayadal is all the more relevant in light of the increasing rigidity of Hindu religious beliefs in contemporary India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay discusses the translations of Luther's writings into the Tamil language spoken in parts of India and other Asian nations. The primary sources come from the Archives and Mission Library of the Francke Foundations (Frankesche Stiftungen) in Halle, Germany. The first German Lutheran missionaries, sent by the King of Denmark, arrived in Tranquebar, India in 1706. Local people helped them learn the spoken form of Tamil. The first Luther document in Tamil was printed in 1713, a Summary of his Small Catechism. The Catechism has been the central Luther document printed in Tamil ever since. In the 1990s, Lutherans recruited a group of translators and have since translated the three great treatises of 1520 and several other important documents from the 1520s and 1530s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Narratives can be described as natural cognitive and linguistic forms through which individuals attempt to order, organize and express meaning. Through narratives individuals make sense of their experiences and represent themselves to others. Narrative analysis is an approach taken to interview data that is concerned with understanding how and why people talk about their lives as a story or a series of stories. The purpose of the study was to access narrative skills in Tamil speaking young adults. The study was carried out in 20 young Tamil speaking adults which included 10 male and 10 female. The results obtained from trouble source, repair and resolution among male and female cross comparison were nonsignificant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Overview: Handwriting recognition (HR) involves converting handwritten text into machine-readable text. Tamil handwritten document recognition remains a challenging process in various text real-world applications owing to the differences in the sizes, styles and orientation angles of Tamil alphabets. Prior studies concentrated only on character-level segmentation, and each character was subsequently classified. The recently developed machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) approaches can be utilized for Tamil handwritten character recognition (HCR). Objective: This paper attempts to present an end-to-end DL-based Tamil handwritten document recognition (ETEDL-THDR) model. Methods: Segmentation is used, first at the word level and then at the line level. ETEDL-THDR text recognition can be accomplished using two modules: line segmentation and line recognition. Initially, the text ETEDL-THDR model targets improving input image quality using the median filtering (MF) technique. To create meaningful regions, more line and character segmentation activities are performed. A deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) based MobileNet approach is also applied to derive feature vectors. Finally, the water strider optimization (WSO) algorithm with a bidirectional gated recurrent unit (BiGRU) model is used to identify the Tamil characters. Results: Extensive experimental analyses of the text ETEDL-THDR model have been carried out, and the results show that the text ETEDL-THDR model performs better than more recent methodologies, with a maximum accuracy of 98.48%, a precision of 98.38%, a sensitivity of 97.98%, specificity of 98.27% and text F-measure of 98.35%. Conclusion: The comparison results show that the proposed model can recognize Tamil handwritten documents in real time.

The current study investigates the impact of the teachers' societal dominant language use within a weak version of translanguaging in early heritage language education. We explored five preschool teachers' use of English, the dominant majority language, in Tamil heritage language classes in Singapore and examined its impact on 33 children's immediate language production in class and in their Tamil language storytelling at the end of the academic year. Our findings demonstrate that while the conventional thinking of protecting the heritage language's pureness is still dominant, the Tamil language teachers did employ English in their Tamil instruction, and their English use had a substantial variation in frequency. The teachers mostly switched to English due to habituation but not with explicit instructional purposes. When English use aided language instruction, it facilitated children's comprehension and elicited more child talk. Results also indicated that children model their teacher's English usage in their immediate responses. When teachers increased their English use in daily practice, children also incorporated increased English use in their Tamil storytelling task at the end of the academic year. Regardless of English use, however, children's output remained predominantly in Tamil. The implication of using translanguaging in early heritage language education is discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background and Objectives: The study attempted to trace age-related changes in speech perception in typically developing children (=3 to =6 years) using the "Early Speech Perception (ESP)" in Tamil. The test was developed in line with the original English version of ESP but adapted to suit the linguistic requirement of the Tamil language. Subjects and Methods: Using a cross-sectional design, the test was administered to 205 children with normal hearing who were classified into three age groups (=3 to =4, >4 to =5, and >5 to =6 years). The developed test had three subtests (syllable categorization, bisyllable word identification, and trisyllable word identification). Results: All three age groups obtained perfect or near-perfect scores on the three subtests of ESP. There was no significant difference observed between the two adjacent age groups (=3 to =4 vs. >4 to =5 years, >4 to =5 vs. >5 to =6 years) for all three subtests. However, significant differences were seen only between the youngest and the oldest age groups for the three subtests (=3 to =4 vs. >5 to =6 years). Conclusions: The results indicated that ESP in Tamil can be performed effectively in all the three age groups studied. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study is located in a lesser-known educational context and investigates aspects of migration, religion and multilingualism. Focusing on the discourse of second-generation adolescent migrants in a Tamil Hindu temple school in urban Australia, I discuss how flexible language practices manifest in this migrant faith setting. I argue that the use of the heritage language is not always at the forefront, despite a monolingual Tamil language policy, because religious transmission is given priority over language transmission. At the same time, there are certain motivations that influence the use of Tamil: to index the close relationship between language and religious culture and to index one's membership of the ethnoreligious community. This paper draws on ethnographic data to provide both a macro and micro view of these motivations – what drives adolescents to use their heritage language, how it is deployed from their linguistic repertoires, and how it contrasts with the use of the students' dominant language, English. The analysis takes a whole of conversation approach to understanding the relationship between religion and heritage language use for second-generation migrant students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper describes the excellent method to get first-rate accuracy and performance in the discipline of Tamil character recognition in a handwritten mode. However, the subject is still at a nascent stage and grossly lacks adequate accuracy in the Tamil language, even though several studies have been conducted within the discipline of handwritten character recognition. This paper draws the attention to the offline handwritten recognition for the Tamil language using the Inception-v3 based transfer learning method. The proposed work is conducted on the readily available HP Tamil handwritten character offline dataset (Hewlett-Packard Lab: hpl-tamil-iso-char-offline-1.0.). It reveals that with the suitable arrangement of transfer learning approach with Inception-v3, the pre-trained model can achieve the recognition accuracy of 93.1%, overtaking the former deep learning designs. The achieved accuracy is due to the use of a pre-trained version with transfer learning that regularly hastens the method of the training process on a new task. Overall, this results in higher accuracy and a more capable version. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper identifies the problems of learning and teaching English as second language in Senior Secondary Schools in Car Nicobar Island of Andaman and Nicobar Islands primarily by those who are speakers of 'Nicobarese' language in Andaman and Nicobar Islands. The main focus of the study is Hindi and Tamil Language Interferences amongst Nicobarese Students Learning English as a Second Language at Senior Secondary School Level in Car Nicobar Island. This study also focuses on the importance of English language education based on the problems of the present-day language curriculum in Andaman. The research also aims to explore the experience of students learning English as a second language and the problems faced by them in reading and writing skills. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper attempts to develop an application that converts Tamil and Vietnamese speech to text, with a view to encourage usage and indirectly ensure linguistic preservation of a classical language. The application converts spoken Tamil and Vietnamese to text without auto-correction, code-mixing or code-switching. This paper proposed a complete web application, which, when perfected, could be used to act as a teaching tool to encourage correct pronunciation of syllables and words for native and non-native Tamil and Vietnamese speakers. The paper further explores similarities and differences in the two contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on (a) a period of forced and semi‐forced migration to newly established colonies under slavery and indenture in the era of European imperialism; and (b) a post‐independence period of economic migration involving voluntary movements of large numbers of individuals to those colonies. It will show that there is no one‐size‐fits‐all outcome regarding the linguistics of migration. Rather, the patterns of migration matter greatly. The paper describes past and ongoing research into five Indian languages of South Africa: Bhojpuri‐Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Konkani and Gujarati. The diaspora varieties that evolved over a 150‐year period fall into four sociohistoric types, chiefly involving the formation of koinés as against individual dialect persistence. Implicated in these differential outcomes are important input factors like (a) areas of recruitment and origin and their linguistic diversity, (b) patterns of migration, whether unilinear, circular or chain migration, (c) internal relations among migrants with other Indian groups and (d) varied power relations involving other South Africans. The paper also presents research on the relations and interactions between the older diasporas and new Indian migrants of the global era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study was carried out with 120 Native Tamil speakers to know the effects of age and instructional language on narrative comprehension and inference-making ability. Children from 3rd to 5th grades (8 to 11 years) were divided into Group A (n = 60; Monolinguals) and Group B (n = 60; Bilinguals). Seven questions were framed to assess literal content (2 questions), coherence inference (2 questions), simile comprehension (2 questions), and elaborative inference (1 question). Written responses were obtained from participants after listening to the audiotape of a narrative passage. Group A provided responses in Tamil after listening to the passage in Tamil, and Group B provided responses in Tamil and English after listening to passages in Tamil and English. The responses were scored by three speech-language pathologists and average scores were statistically analyzed. The scores of the statistical analysis showed a difference of performance only across age. Qualitative analysis of inference types showed literal and coherence inferences were easier to make than simile comprehension and elaborative inferences for all groups. The findings of the study highlight how the comprehension of the narrative macrostructure and inference making is affected by age and instructional language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tamil verb stems may be inclusive of a voice morpheme that encodes the degree of agency of the verb. Hence, using Paramasivam’s (1979) terminology, these kinds of verbs are paired verbs of which one is the affective and the other its effective counterpart. In the former, the action expressed by the verb is realised by an agent and affects a patient, whereas in the latter the consequences of the action fall on the subject who realises the action.This paper intends to analyse how missionaries described the verb system of Tamil which differed substantially from their own model of reference (Latin and Portuguese), and how they understood paired verbs, as defined above. As such, taking into account the Western sources that missionaries used to compose and organise their descriptions, this paper focuses on both verb conjugations and paired verbs in Tamil. It also demonstrates how the Latin grammatical framework was applied for the description of Tamil verbs and discusses the Indian grammatical sources available to missionaries.Given that the present classification of Tamil verbs is based on the one offered by a missionary, Karl Friedrich Leberecht Graul (1814–1864), this study highlights how earlier missionaries’ descriptions contributed to the current classification.

Narrative has long been considered as one of the first and most skilled uses of language. The primary way in which human beings make sense of their experience is by casting it in a narrative form, 'this happened and so that happened' (Pipe et al. 1999). The present study profiled the development of story grammar components of 200 typically developing Tamil speaking children in a story retelling task, in the age range 3 years to 6 years 11 months. The analysis revealed a developmental trend in the acquisition and expression of the story grammar components. The cognitive language interplay in narrative context has been discussed. The patterns of presentation across age groups have been discussed in this paper. This study would provide normative data to evaluate narrative in Tamil speaking children. The pattern of acquisition of narrative would help plan intervention for children with language disorders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article looks at variations and irregularities observed in the centralized vowels of the tribal languages spoken in India. Topics include a brief background on the existence of Dravidian family of languages which has approximately 222 million speakers, the entire phonemic system of centralized vowels found in the tribal languages of Nilgiris, and the implication of these centralized vowels on the dominant language Tamil.

This paper presents an open source and extendable Morphological Analyser cum Generator (MAG) for Tamil named ThamizhiMorph. Tamil is a low-resource language in terms of NLP processing tools and applications. In addition, most of the available tools are neither open nor extendable. A morphological analyser is a key resource for the storage and retrieval of morphophonological and morphosyntactic information, especially for morphologically rich languages, and is also useful for developing applications within Machine Translation. This paper describes how ThamizhiMorph is designed using a Finite-State Transducer (FST) and implemented using Foma. We discuss our design decisions based on the peculiarities of Tamil and its nominal and verbal paradigms. We specify a high-level meta-language to efficiently characterise the language's inflectional morphology. We evaluate ThamizhiMorph using text from a Tamil textbook and the Tamil Universal Dependency treebank version 2.5. The evaluation and error analysis attest a very high performance level, with the identified errors being mostly due to out-of-vocabulary items, which are easily fixable. In order to foster further development, we have made our scripts, the FST models, lexicons, Meta-Morphological rules, lists of generated verbs and nouns, and test data sets freely available for others to use and extend upon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Assessment plays an important role in learning and Multiple Choice Questions (MCQs) are quite popular in large-scale evaluations. Technology enabled learning necessitates a smart assessment. Therefore, automatic MCQ generation became increasingly popular in the last two decades. Despite a large amount of research effort, system generated MCQs are not useful in real educational applications. This is because of the inability to produce the diverse and human alike distractors. Distractors are the wrong choices given along with the correct answer (key) to confuse the examinee. Especially, in educational domain (grammar learning) the MCQs deal with affix-based or morphologically transformed distractors. In this paper, we present a method for automatic generation of affix-based distractors for fill-in-the-blanks for learning Tamil Vocabulary. Affix-based distractor generation relies on certain regularities manifest in high dimensional spaces. We investigate the quality of distractors generated by a number of criteria, including Part-Of-Speech, difficulty level, spelling, word co-occurrence, semantic similarity and affixation. We evaluated our proposed method in grammar based Multiple Choice Questions (MCQs) dataset. The result shows that affix-based distractors, yield significantly more plausible outcomes in certain grammar based questions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mostly sentiment analysis employs dictionary approaches for recognizing the polarity of terms in a review. However, in sentiment analysis between different domains called domain adaptation (DA), the sentiment lexicon disappoints that leads to the feature mismatch problem. Now, many e-commerce sites try to process reviews in their native languages. In this paper, we propose an enhanced dictionary in our native language (Tamil) that aims at building contextual relationships among the terms of multi-domain datasets that tries to minimize the feature mismatch problem. The proposed dictionary employs both labeled and unlabeled data from the source domain and unlabeled data from the target domain. More precisely, the initial dictionary explores pointwise mutual information for calculating contextual weight then the final dictionary estimates the rank score based on the importance of terms among all the reviews. This work intends to classify reviews of multiple target domains in Tamil by using the unified dictionary with a large number of vocabularies. This extendible dictionary significantly improves the accuracy of DA with the other baseline methods and handles many words in multiple domains with ease. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Translation is the transfer of the meaning from one language to another. The translator may face many problems and difficulties in the process of translation. The main problems are syntactic, linguistics, cultural matters, and specific text. Discussing the difficulties of translation from English to Tamil and Tamil to English are important fields of translation because of the intensive need to this type of research. This study aims at detecting the problems of translating wordy sentences from English to Tamil. This work focuses its light on the syntactic problems. This study is based on the hypothesis that almost all the sentences contain redundancies or other unnecessary repetitions. Translators know the syntactic process of translation and use them correctly in their translations. The objective of this research is to identify type of syntactic errors in translation, student? difficulties in translating text, and factors influence students? error in translating English to Tamil. The research used descriptive and quantitative method. The results of this research showed the difficulties in translating from English to Tamil were elliptical errors, idioms, textual meaning, grammatical issues (tenses, word order, clauses,), structural ambiguity, and lack of strategy in syntactical errors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tamil verb stems may be inclusive of a voice morpheme that encodes the degree of agency of the verb. Hence, using Paramasivam’s (1979) terminology, these kinds of verbs are paired verbs of which one is the affective and the other its effective counterpart. In the former, the action expressed by the verb is realised by an agent and affects a patient, whereas in the latter the consequences of the action fall on the subject who realises the action. This paper intends to analyse how missionaries described the verb system of Tamil which differed substantially from their own model of reference (Latin and Portuguese), and how they understood paired verbs, as defined above. As such, taking into account the Western sources that missionaries used to compose and organise their descriptions, this paper focuses on both verb conjugations and paired verbs in Tamil. It also demonstrates how the Latin grammatical framework was applied for the description of Tamil verbs and discusses the Indian grammatical sources available to missionaries. Given that the present classification of Tamil verbs is based on the one offered by a missionary, Karl Friedrich Leberecht Graul (1814–1864), this study highlights how earlier missionaries’ descriptions contributed to the current classification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Part of Speech (POS) tagging is a general process of classifying words into their parts, labeling them into different categories like Nouns, Verbs, Adjective, and Adverbs and so on. These different categories of words can be defined in a tagset. The tagset can be used for automatically assigning a word with a tag. Noun forms the first category of words generally found in any sentence and verb comes next. A verb actually describes the event occurrence or an action.in Tamil language, a verb form gets inflected by suffixes based on person, count, tense and voice. These suffixes are identified by reverse splitting method and the word is tagged as Verb. In this paper, tagging of words for Tamil language particular to Verb has been carried out. The implementation involves a rule based suffix stripping method for identifying verbs where suffixes are checked with the grammatical rules and are tagged as verb. The implementation proposed uses the traditional way of identifying a word based on grammatical rules in Tamil language, thus avoiding the process of transliteration. The implementation identifies a word based on grammatical rules, applies reverse splitting method and categorizes the words as VERB. The input is considered as Tamil words in their Unicode format, thus avoiding the process of transliteration. Most of the work done in the area of Text mining of Tamil documents mainly involves transliteration. Applying Tamil grammatical rules enrich the identification and tagging of words during morphological analysis as morphophonemic rules are considered. This is an advantage while tagging of words is considered for Tamil documents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the Tamil language revitalisation efforts undertaken by the Myanmar-Tamils living in Yangon post-2010. The data consists of informal and semi-structured interviews as well as participant observation. Following a historical overview, this article highlights some of the strategies that members of the Myanmar-Tamil community have employed to revitalise Tamil. This article argues that the long-term sustainability of these efforts remains uncertain. Firstly, the historical discrimination faced by the Myanmar-Tamils has left behind a legacy of fear. Secondly, due to a lack of what Fishman terms 'ideological clarifications' within the community, agents for language revitalisation have little understanding of the competing beliefs that members of the community hold about the language, making it challenging for language revitalisation to occur. This article highlights that in persecuted minority-language communities, the success of language revitalisation efforts hinges not only on external support but also on the community's ability to garner internal support. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is an attempt to interpret a fact that Friendship is one of the prevailing facets of the Middle English and Tamil Elegies. Elegy is a sad poem usually written to praise and express sorrow for high positioned person who is dead. Though, this paper projects the elegies of two different cultures and traditions, it neatly delineates the fine illustrations of friendship which is common in both the elegies. This paper focuses not only the common facets of elegies but also in the contrast fact that is friend in Tamil elegies between the king and the poet, the patron and the poet, which is sincere and natural, but in English it is the friendship between friends, which is insincere and artificial. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigated vowel space area in children with unilateral cochlear implant (CI) and compared it with typically developing (TD) children. More specifically, this study compared the vowel space characteristics across the short vowels /a/,/i/, /u/ in word medial position in Tamil. Subjects were divided into two groups. Group I consisted of 10 children with unilateral cochlear implant (CI) in the age range of 3 to 11 years. Group II consisted of 10 age matched peers. Pictures for the three words with short vowels /a/, /i/ & /u/ in the word medial position were prepared and presented to children individually and were instructed to name them. Audiorecording of naming was done using Computerized Speech Lab 4500 and formants 1 and 2 were extracted. Using the frequency values of formant 1 and 2, vowel triangle was plotted. The formant values and vowel triangle space were compared between the groups. Results of the study showed significant differences in first and second formant frequencies between the groups and a smaller vowel space area for children using CI. The reduced vowel space area represents deviant articulation abilities in children with CI when compared TD children during vowel production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cryptography is one of the most accepted and successful data security methods used at present by most of the organizations. Encrypting the message using natural languages reduces the encryption time and improves the performance. Tamil is a most ancient Dravidian language spoken in the southern part of India. Here we use Tamil language for encrypting the text named as Tamilian Cryptography. Since Tamil language has 247 characters it is very difficult to crack the message. The message to be encrypted is translated to Tamil language, this translated text is then mapped to a randomly generated 2-bit combination of English alphabets. The result of this process is called intermediate cipher (inter cipher). This is an hybrid algorithm since the inter cipher is encrypted using Advanced Encryption Standard algorithm to enhance the confidentiality of the text. Since the Tamilian Cryptography makes use of three phases namely Translation, Mapping and Encryption, it makes the data much more secure than the existing algorithms like blowfish and Data Encryption Standard (DES) and also the person who tries to decrypt must have the knowledge of Tamil language as well the mapping details to see the original data and This algorithm exhibits stronger avalanche effect of 95% which is greater than blowfish and DES. The evaluation of the proposed algorithm shows that it executes faster and has comparatively lesser encryption time, less memory overhead. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]