Beginning Tamil.

An introductory textbook on Tamil grammar is presented. Tamil is spoken by the majority of the people who live in the State of Tamil Nadu in India. The 35 lessons cover the following: the Tamil alphabet, pronouns, morphophonemic rules, the plural, the imperative, the infinitive and negative imperative, oblique forms and uses, the dative and accusative, the sociative and instrumental, the locative and ablative, postpositions, impersonal verbs, adverbs, the potential, the prohibitive, the permissive, the present tense, the ordinary negative, the future and past tenses, numbers, the converbial, the negative converbial, the conditional and negative conditional, compound verbs, the participle, the verbal noun, the participial noun, the adjectival noun, the causative, the passive, interrogatives plus suffixes, the comparative and superlative, indirect discourse, and concessive of fact and supposition. Appendices contain other grammatical forms and a summary of verb forms, a grammatical index, a Tamil-English dictionary, an English-Tamil glossary, and spoken Tamil rules are included. Exercises and vocabulary sections are included. (SW)