Tamil studies
The Tamil is an independent, closely linked to the Indology and South Asian Studies related science that deals with the language, literature and history of Tamil is concerned. Although Tamil has the longest literary history of all Indian languages at over 2000 years and is recognized as a classical language in the Indian region , in Europe it still has a subordinate position compared to Indology, which mainly deals with the languages Sanskrit and Hindi a. The Institute for Indology and Tamil Studies at the University of Cologne is the only one in Europe with a focus on Tamil Studies. In addition, Tamil is taught in German-speaking countries at the South Asia Institute at Heidelberg University .
Research history
Tamil has a very old indigenous grammar tradition. The oldest Tamil grammar and at the same time the oldest known work of Tamil literature at all, the Tolkappiyam, comes from the 1st or 2nd century BC. BC. But there were probably older forerunners that have not survived. A second well-known grammar is the Nannul (around 1200).
The first Europeans who dealt with Tamil, then called "Malabar", were Christian missionaries. The Portuguese Jesuit Anrique Anriquez (approx. 1520–1600) wrote religious texts in Tamil, wrote a Tamil grammar and had the first Tamil book printed in 1554, still in Latin script, and the first book in Tamil script in 1578. Other missionaries who took care of Tamil were the Italian Constantine Beschi (1680–1743), to whom some lasting orthographic innovations in the Tamil script go back, and the German Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg (1682–1719).
Western Indology, which emerged around 1800, was initially primarily concerned with Sanskrit. When Robert Caldwell discovered the independence of the Dravidian languages in 1856, scientific interest in this language family increased, but Tamil remained of significantly less importance than Hindi or Sanskrit.