Tamil: Blog aggregators, education, middle east and manslaughter

Bharat — Fri, 16 Jun 2006 05:58:14 +0000

Tamil blogs have risen in a big way since they started showing up some years back. Similar to other blog spheres, collaborative blogs were started, blog aggregators came into existence, tag teasings were done and podcasts were made( [link 1] [link 2] [link3]. Thamizmanam, an automated blog aggregator tracks approximately 1000 tamil blogs and its statistics say that there are approximately 100 - 150 posts made everyday which attract anywhere between 750 - 1000 comments. Though the number of posts is not very significant compared to the bigger picture, the average readership as reflected by the healthy post - comment ratio is very good. Another automated aggregator is Thenkoodu. Even mainstream aggregators like bloglines and technorati support tamil blogs. Gilli is an aggregator that features posts hand-picked by a group of very efficient bloggers who religiously keep track of tamil blogs from various parts of the world. Kasi, in a guest column for gilli, traces the evolution of tamil blogs till date. Tamilblogs has a directory of tamil blogs sorted alphabetically in tamil. With quite a significant presence of the language in the blog world, it's a wonder that google does not offer a tamil search option with blogsearch.

The recent elections in Tamil Nadu saw the political party DMK rise to power. One of their major political moves was a law that made tamil a mandatory language in schools that fall under the Tamil Nadu State board stream. Badri shares his thoughts on the issue. Things can get tricky when translations for scientific terms/processes are made. New words are born in tamil with brisk neologism, but it is indeed a challenge to first coin tamil equivalents for the existing terms and then to keep pace with the new ones. Penetration and web presence don't help much like the english language to spread new words. Selvaraj has a couple of posts on ““An Introduction to Chemical Engineering”” which primarily distinguishes chemistry from chemical engineering. He also discusses some chemical engineering processes and provides translations to some key words used in the field. It shows that technical studies entirely in tamil are difficult but not impossible.

Football is on and the tamil blog world is no exception. kaalpanthu2006 is a dedicated blog on the Football WorldCup 2006. Liveblogging of the matches, post-match analysis and predictions can be found here. All in tamil.

The Middle East too has a small poulation blogging in tamil. Narayanan shares his experiences in Dubai while on a business trip, Dubaivasi invites people to a blood donation drive , Azadak sheds some light on skyrocketing real estate prices in Dubai and Raja has a poem depicting his love for his motherland.

The Sri Lankan tamil blog world seems to be sober.
[Warning:Disturbing images]
Jeyaraj talks about the killing of a family in Vankalai by Sri Lankan Army soldiers ending the post with a couplet from Thirukkural. Moorthy Martin, his wife, son and daughter were killed by a group identified as Sri Lankan Army personnel by eye-witnesses. It is alleged that Mary, Martin's wife was raped and all the four were subject to brutal torture. koluvithaluvi mourns the death and Karthik has a poem in tribute. (The story in english and a follow up)

Demystifying Tamil as a language and a person

Bharat — Wed, 31 May 2006 08:30:18 +0000

What is Tamil? For some it's a language, for some it's a religion, for the uninitiated, wikipedia to the rescue. There is of course also the the Wikipedia in Tamil.

For those who don't like reading pages and pages, google current has it all. From “what is Tamil” to “the latest in Tamil cinema” while discussing matrimonial sites, all under 3 minutes. If you absolutely detest external links, Tamil is an anglicized moniker of “Thamizh”, an ancient language spoken majorly in India, Sri Lanka and Singapore. Speakers of the language are called “Tamils”.

Picture this. The english alphabet has 26 letters. Tamil has 12 vowels and 18 consonants and we have derived characters from the combination of these vowels and consonants. If you do the math, that's 247 characters in all. Our ancestors dumped the idea of having an ABCD rhyme equivalent for the Tamil character set after the initial test ran for more than 1/2 a day. They instead devised a rhyme scheme for the vowels alone that goes “aana aavanna” and so on.[1]

Tamil has innumerable dialects depending on the place it is spoken in. Sanga Thamizh is the ancient form and Tamil still is written in this form. Spoken Tamil is very different compared to written tamil.“Madras baashai” is a very popular variant that has an ever growing vocabulary as it borrows words from English day after day after day. For example: “Peter” means a guy well versed in English and “Mary” is his female counterpart. Note that both “Peter” and “Mary” are Tamil words in this context. Wikipedia has a comprehensive but non-exhaustive list. Adding a “la” after every sentence in “normal” tamil makes it Singapore tamil while the SriLankans have a unique accent and their language set contains some words that do not figure in the vocabulary of “mainstream” Tamil.

Literary works in Tamil date back to 200 BC. “Tolkaappiyam” is one of the earliest known grammar books to have been written. Myle Vaughanan has an interesting post on the history and literary works in tamil. A work of note is the Thiruvasagam, written by Manickavasagar somewhere between 6th and 11th century CE, translated by G.U.Pope to english in the 20th century and set to music by Ilaiyaraaja in the 21st century. Priya has a series of posts on the epic poem.

Tamil language has been computerized for quite some time now and has its own encoding scheme called TSCII. Though the system is fraught with compatibility issues with encoding schemes and OS support, a search on how to solve these will get you ready to read and write tamil web content in less than 10 minutes. Gilli tells you how. Tamil Nation has a more detailed article on tamil keyboards,fonts and software. While companies like Microsoft have embraced the tamil language, Nagarajan is bothered about the Tamil Nadu government switching to open source and discusses the monetary benefits involved. If you still use a Windows 98 machine, “erumbugal” has a post on how to enable tamil fonts. Can't download fonts or feel lazy to go through the entire process? jaffnalibrary has an online application that'll recode data for you to tamil regardless of the format you type in.

Singapore has a considerable number of tamil bloggers. Shivaji Das has a satirical comparison of Jews and Tamils while discussing the simple needs of a tamil. It's a sneak peek into the life of a tamil in Singapore. Thugchic laments that “Ahpunehneh” is not a proper word! though it's been used widely.

Sri Lanka has the second largest tamil speaking population in the world. Sri Rangan writes his views on democracy in the sub-continental region in this post titled “Democracy- A new perspective”. Samarajiva talks about the Tamil Nadu government adopting the Tamil SMS system developed in Sri Lanka.

Listen to news in Tamil on BBC online.
Knowledge-purgation, authored by an interestingly named “knowledge-undertaker” discusses the future of Tamil language that has been constantly butchered by its improper use and increasing lethargy of native speakers in sticking to semantics.

Interested in learning the language?

[1] - Author's attempt at humor

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Tamil: Blog aggregators, education, middle east and manslaughter

Demystifying Tamil as a language and a person