THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Did you know that ‘kili’ in Malayalam could mean any bird but in Tamil, it specifically means ‘parrot’? Also, for a Malayali, the word ‘avasaram’ is an ‘opportunity’ but for a Tamilian it means ‘hurry’. There is an entire section dedicated to such words sounding the same but with different meanings in the first comprehensive Tamil-Malayalam dictionary brought out recently by the University of Kerala.
Edited by T Vijayalakshmi, associate professor at the varsity’s Department of Tamil, the 1,600-page dictionary contains around 40,000 words, most of which are drawn from everyday life.
Besides the academic community, the dictionary is quite helpful for any Malayalam speaker who wants to learn Tamil, thanks to the pronunciation of each word provided in Malayalam and the simple and contextual way in which it is used in the sample sentences.
It took Vijayalakshmi eight years of painstaking efforts for the dictionary to become a reality. The `11-lakh project funded by the university began in 2015 but hit a roadblock in 2017.
The project was revived after Dr Mohanan Kunnummal assumed charge as KU’s vice chancellor last year. The dictionary was recently released by Governor Arif Mohammed Khan.
In between her academic duties, Vijayalakshmi oversaw the preparation of an exhaustive database of Tamil words. Priority was given to words from everyday life, including those popularised through social media. N K Subhash, former sub-editor of the Malayalam lexicon at the university, assisted Vijayalakshmi in identifying the apt Malayalam equivalents to the Tamil headwords. According to Vijayalakshmi, most dictionaries only have masculine nouns with no mention of their feminine equivalents.
‘Tamil needs to be promoted in state’s higher education sector’
The Tamil-Malayalam dictionary has attempted to address the drawback to a large extent. Besides, most of the sample sentences have been framed with a woman’s perspective, she added.
An academic well-versed in both Tamil and Malayalam, Vijayalakshmi rued the general sense of apathy towards Tamil in the state’s higher education sector. “A student of Malayalam language and literature is encouraged to take up Sanskrit as the subsidiary subject when the ideal choice should be Tamil.
The dictionary is a small step to strengthen the bond between the two Dravidian languages that have common roots,” she added. Recently, Vijayalakshmi was chosen visiting professor of Tamil studies at the Indian Council for Cultural Relations and Chair of Indian Studies at the University of Houston, United States. She is scheduled to take up the year-long assignment next month.
What's planned
According to KU sources, the varsity also has plans to bring out an online version of the dictionary for wider access by the academic community as well as the general public. Besides, the Central Institute of Classical Tamil in Chennai, an autonomous research institution under the Ministry of Education, has evinced interest in printing and distributing the dictionary on a large scale in association with the University of Kerala.