from The Times of India)
by Bosco Dominique
PUDUCHERRY: A Madurai-based organization has reproduced an ancient book in Tamil written by an anonymous European Christian missionary way back in 1840 in the then French colony of Puducherry.
The 100-page book, titled 'Concise Grammar in Tamil,' has a set of 136 questions and answers giving basic details about Tamil alphabets, words and formation of sentences. The author of the book was a French missionary who learned Tamil after coming to Puducherry.
The then French education board published the book to help the visiting Christian missionaries from Mission Etrangers de Paris, MEP, ( Foreign Missionaries of Paris), France, learn and comprehend the Tamil language.
Archbishop of Puducherry and Cuddalore Antony Anandarayar will release the book, reproduced by the Thazhi Research Centre (TRC), a forum specializing in linguistic purity and published by the Thazhi Foundation (TF), in Puducherry on December 29.
"The visiting European Christian missionaries, who had mastered Latin, always found Tamil language interesting as there were a lot of similarities between the two ancient languages. Both Tamil and Latin have four parts of speech. Moreover, sentence construction was also almost the same," said TF founder and TRC president A Arivan.
The book includes a preface on how effectively it can be used and methodologies to be followed while teaching students.
The MEP has launched efforts to find all ancient books written by the European Christian missionaries all over the world. The TRC has been coordinating with ancient linguistic organizations, besides organizations like the MEP, throughout the world to locate and to reproduce ancient books.
The TRC specializes on seven languages - Tamil, English, French, German, Latin, Greek and Chinese. It has so far found eight ancient books written between 1700 AD and 1900 AD. One book is trilingual (French-English-Tamil), two bilingual (French-Tamil and Tamil-Latin) and rest five books are in Tamil.
One of the books has a list of European Christian missionaries, who authored several books in Tamil during their stay in Puducherry in the late 1700s. The list, which contains more than 100 missionaries, runs for 16 pages. These missionaries visited Puducherry 300 years ago for social service and religious conversion.
"We decided not to reprint the books but to reproduce the contents in modern Tamil without changing the meaning for easy comprehension. Most of the modern day readers will not comprehend the books if reprinted again," said Arivan, who can speak and write Tamil, English and French. He is learning German and Spanish.
He said copyright laws would not be applicable for reprinting or reproducing books by anonymous authors that were published more than 75 years ago. The organization is planning to reproduce all the other seven ancient books.
The TF, which was formed with the sole objective to unearth ancient books and reproduce them, has seven members headed by its president R Carounagarane. The foundation proposes to present the book free of cost to teachers and students, besides selling it to others.
The book, priced at Rs 100, will be available at the TRC, No 9, Amaidhicholai, Thirunagar, Madurai - 625 006 after its official launch in Puducherry on December 29.
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