தமிழ் அரிச்சுவடி is how you would translate and write out the above title in the Tamil language. Tamil is one of the national languages of India and is the chief one used at the southeastern tip of that country's peninsula in the state of Tamil Nadu (capital Chennai, formerly Madras). It is also the second language spoken on the nearby island nation of Sri Lanka...there has been an ongoing conflict there between the majority Sinhalese and the minority Tamil, some of whom have staged a guerilla war for independence. But back to the language and its script...
If you've ever explored the world of Indian languages, you've probably, as I have, become intrigued by the multiplicity of writing systems...even among similar languages. As you go further south, the scripts can get downright strange and even beautiful. That was the impression that the Tamil script made on me when I first beheld it while reading a book on world languages back in the 1970s. At one point I even memorized its "alphabet", although I never undertook a serious study of the language. And I still haven't, to this date. After all, the only real connection I have with Tamil is our family physician for many years back in the 1990s, who is a Tamil...
Omniglot is an excellent language learning site on the World Wide Web. It has a very user-friendly introduction to Tamil script which, when you scroll down the page I'm supplying the link to [link], you'll see can get to be pretty complicated. Still, just look at the different letters and tell me whether or not you agree that some of them are beautiful...especially the Tamil letter for "short i":
இ
Tamil belongs to the Dravidian family of Indian languages, primarily, but not exclusively, concentrated in the country's southern peninsula. The Dravidians are the people who inhabited what is now called India/Pakistan/Bangladesh until the Indo-Europeans invaded/settled the area and either drove them out or assimilated them into their own societies. Languages like Hindi, Punjabi, Bengali, and Sri Lanka's majority tongue Sinhalese are all in the Indic group of the Indo-European family of languages...to which English, French, German, Latin, Greek, Russian, and Persian also belong. Tamil, along with Malayalam, Telugu, and Kannada, are the four major Dravidian languages, each with its own distinctive script (although Telugu and Kannada are rather similar). I'm thinking of relearning the Tamil script and, now with the learning opportunities available via the Internet, beginning a rudimentary study of Tamil's basic vocabulary and sentence structure...
