Tamil, being a rich language with long history and the primary language of a large family of languages spoken throughout south Asia, naturally has relationship with other families of languages also. The Ural-Altaic family of central and eastern Asia is one such family of languages, which is spoken over a vast region that borders on Europe on the west and extends up to the Pacific Ocean on the east. Japanese, like the Korean language, is usually included in the Altaic branch of this family, though genetic relationship of Japanese to other languages has not been linguistically established. Bishop Robert Caldwell, in his path breaking A Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian or South Indian Family of Languages (1856) had pointed out some lexical correspondences between Tamil and the Japanese language.
The present book compares hundreds of Tamil and Japanese words that bear phonetic and semantic resemblances. The sound-meaning correspondences are interesting. The linguistic affinity of any language with Tamil, an important classical language of the world, also serves to establish the antiquity of that language. I only believe that such works that reveal the affinity of Tamil with other important languages of Asia go a long way in establishing the universal character of the ancient Tamil people and their rich linguistic heritage, as can be seen from the Carikam literature, which is one of the most ancient literary corpuses of the world.
The duo of Arunasalam and Manonmani is a dedicated academic couple in the Tamil literary horizon. Their work is a rare gift of its own kind to the linguists in general and Tamilologists in particular.
It all started on a day at the Fifth International Conference/Seminar of Tamil Studies held in Madurai in January 1981. That was the day on which Professor Susumu Ohno presented his paper on "Japanese - Tamil Relationship" at the Plenary Session of the Conference. Manonmani and I were seated next to Dr. K. Kailasapathy in the front row. Ohno submitted more than three hundred words that astonishingly exhibited similarity in sound and meaning. When we listened to his paper, both of us thought that it would be interesting if we get a chance to investigate his proposition and to study the words that the Japanese scholar presented. God must have read our thought. We were getting ready to go to Nigeria to accept a visiting assignment at the Department of Linguistics and Nigerian Languages at the University of Ibadan. Just a week before our departure, University of Jaffna inquired whether I would be interested in applying for a Senior Fellowship offered by the Japan Foundation. We were extremely happy. I wrote a proposal mentioning that I would like to associate with Professor Susumu Ohno at the Gakushuin University, Tokyo to verify his findings in connection with Japanese -Tamil Relationship. Japan Foundation awarded the Fellowship. We joined Professor Ohno's research project in March 1983. We witnessed the untiring research study by Professor Ohno. He has left a theory that cannot be overlooked by any scholar who studies Dravidian languages (Cf. Kamil Zvelebil's Dravidian Linguistics An Introduction published in 1990).
Professor Ohno was much benefitted by his association with Professor Pon. Kothandaraman. He learnt Tirukkural from him. Professor Ohno, Professor Pon Kothandaraman, Manonmani and I formed a Research Team to study the Japanaese - Tamil Relationship. There were a lot of criticisms on Ohno's theory. At one point the main criticism was that Professor Ohno did not know ancient Tamil literature and one scholar has even gone up to say that he was presenting false lexical items. But when we joined him we were very careful to verify the Tamil words that he has been citing from ancient Tamil literature.
Book's Contents and Sample Pages
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