Friday, Jun 25, 2010. M. Soundariya Preetha

COIMBATORE: The Tamil Nadu government should extend help in developing a new language teaching model to those who want to study Tamil as a foreign language, according to Ulrike Niklas, Tamil Professor at the University of Cologne, Germany.

Expressing her desire to associate herself with such a project, Prof. Niklas told The Hindu here on Thursday that those teaching Tamil to foreign students should undergo training. A specific course was needed for this. Such courses should be introduced in colleges in the State first. The government should also help with financial support in this effort and an international group could be formed to frame the curriculum.

Referring to the growing foreign investment in Tamil Nadu, she said the demand for people who know Tamil language and culture was also likely to go up.

Ms. Niklas, who is here to participate in the World Classical Tamil Conference, said that as Tamil Nadu grew economically, there would be a demand internationally for practical knowledge of Tamil language, society and cultural aspects of the State. Germany and other countries in the European Union were offering practical knowledge to students in their college studies and “we need to create a new curriculum for Tamil language learning in these countries.” A model curriculum could be created for Tamil that could be used for those in the European countries studying other foreign languages too. The learning would be at six levels covering the basic language, speaking in basic situations, reading complex texts and mastering the reading level. “I want to develop a new language teaching model for Tamil.”
(more…)

G Babu Jayakumar First Published : 20 Jun 2010 10:01:00 AM ISTLast Updated : 19 Jun 2010 07:41:36 PM IST

Tamil, which thrived in its quintessential poetic form during the Sangam period and in the subsequent era, was ‘born again’ in the 18th century to gain its prose style, thanks to European missionaries. Though the first Tamil novel, Prathaba Mudaliar Charitram by Samuel Vedanayagam Pillai of Mayuram, a Tamil Christian, was published in 1879, it is Veeramamunivar (Constantino Giuseppe Beschi) who is hailed as the father of Tamil prose.

The author of Parmathma Kuruvin Kathai, a satire on the life and times of a naïve spiritual guru and his obtuse disciples, and Thembavani, Beschi came down from Italy as a Jesuit priest to Madurai in 1711 and mastered the Tamil language like almost every missionary who came to Tamil Nadu for evangelical work.

Beschi’s contribution to Tamil was acknowledged during the Second World Tamil Conference as his was one among the statues unveiled in Chennai. The other two missionaries honoured with statues then were George Uglow Pope, a Protestant from England, who translated Thirukural, Nalladiyar and Tiruvachakam into English, and Robert Caldwell, who coined the term Dravidian.

The missionaries, from both the Roman Catholic and Protestant orders, came from different countries in Europe at the time when Tamil literature was going through a bad patch after the decline of its glorious Sangam period. While the intention of the missionaries was to pick up the local tongue in a bid to reach out to the masses, they were enamoured by the richness and beauty of the literature as they delved into it.
(more…)