I speak a few languages, some pretty well, some passably well. Of these languages Tamil has intrigued me quite a bit. Tamil is a language rich in literature but not very easy to learn/speak.. Thirukkural, a set of 1330 poems each 2 lines long, was written 2000 years back. While I have little interest generally in poems, I have been a fan of Thirukkural from my school days. I still remember a few Thirukkural poems from my school days.
Even 30-40 years back, Tamil used to be a strange language. The spoken version and the written version were quite different. This is quite unlike other languages where the two are similar. Let me explain this. Have you heard a news broadcast in English (which will be similar to written English and formal) ? Can you find people who speak the same way? I would say yes. While there are a lot of people who speak poor English, we would be able to find many people who speak good (almost formal) English. I know the same to be true of couple of other languages as well.
But when it comes to Tamil, what we speak and what we write (or hear in news broadcast) are very different and very unrelated. Speaking Tamil the way it is written would sound comic these days. And I would cringe writing Tamil the way it is spoken now. Tamil has certain letters that are unique and these are pronounced in a particular way. The pronunciation of these special letters even in news broadcasts these days is appalling.
The question that comes to my mind is: what caused Tamil to be so violated? Why is there such a dichotomy between the formal language and the spoken language (spoken anywhere)? I don’t yet have an answer for this. Maybe one day I will find out.
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