71-403: Jaffna International Airport ( Tamil : யாழ்ப்பாணம் சர்வதேச விமான நிலையம் , romanized: Yāḻppāṇam Carvatēca Vimāṉa Nilaiyam ; Sinhala : යාපනය ජාත්යන්තර ගුවන්තොටුපළ , romanized: Yāpanaya Jātyantara Guvantoṭupaḷa ) ( IATA : JAF , ICAO : VCCJ ), formerly known as Palaly Airport and Jaffna Airport , is an international airport serving northern Sri Lanka . It was also
142-468: A lexical root to which one or more affixes are attached. Most Tamil affixes are suffixes . Tamil suffixes can be derivational suffixes, which either change the part of speech of the word or its meaning, or inflectional suffixes, which mark categories such as person , number , mood , tense , etc. There is no absolute limit on the length and extent of agglutination , which can lead to long words with many suffixes, which would require several words or
213-416: A military airbase known as Sri Lanka Air Force Palaly or SLAF Palaly . The airport is located in the town of Palaly near Kankesanthurai , 7 nautical miles (13 km ; 8 mi ) north of the city of Jaffna . It is at an elevation of 10 m (34 ft ) and has one runway designated 05/23 with an asphalt surface measuring 1,400 by 30 metres (4,593 ft × 98 ft). The airport
284-480: A , as with other Indic scripts . This inherent vowel is removed by adding a tittle called a puḷḷi , to the consonantal sign. For example, ன is ṉa (with the inherent a ) and ன் is ṉ (without a vowel). Many Indic scripts have a similar sign, generically called virama , but the Tamil script is somewhat different in that it nearly always uses a visible puḷḷi to indicate a 'dead consonant' (a consonant without
355-740: A 2001 survey, there were 1,863 newspapers published in Tamil, of which 353 were dailies. Tamil is the primary language of the majority of the people residing in Tamil Nadu , Puducherry , (in India) and in the Northern and Eastern provinces of Sri Lanka . The language is spoken among small minority groups in other states of India which include Karnataka , Telangana , Andhra Pradesh , Kerala , Maharashtra , Gujarat , Delhi , Andaman and Nicobar Islands in India and in certain regions of Sri Lanka such as Colombo and
426-511: A family of around 26 languages native to the Indian subcontinent . It is also classified as being part of a Tamil language family that, alongside Tamil proper, includes the languages of about 35 ethno-linguistic groups such as the Irula and Yerukula languages (see SIL Ethnologue ). The closest major relative of Tamil is Malayalam ; the two began diverging around the 9th century CE. Although many of
497-591: A number of apparent Tamil loanwords in Biblical Hebrew dating to before 500 BCE, the oldest attestation of the language. Old Tamil is the period of the Tamil language spanning the 3rd century BCE to the 8th century CE. The earliest records in Old Tamil are short inscriptions from 300 BCE to 700 CE. These inscriptions are written in a variant of the Brahmi script called Tamil-Brahmi . The earliest long text in Old Tamil
568-650: A number of skeletons were found buried in earthenware urns dating from at least 696 BCE in Adichanallur . Some of these urns contained writing in Tamil Brahmi script, and some contained skeletons of Tamil origin. Between 2017 and 2018, 5,820 artifacts have been found in Keezhadi . These were sent to Beta Analytic in Miami , Florida , for Accelerator Mass Spectrometry (AMS) dating. One sample containing Tamil-Brahmi inscriptions
639-512: A number of sound changes, in particular, a tendency to lower high vowels in initial and medial positions, and the disappearance of vowels between plosives and between a plosive and rhotic. Contact with European languages affected written and spoken Tamil. Changes in written Tamil include the use of European-style punctuation and the use of consonant clusters that were not permitted in Middle Tamil. The syntax of written Tamil has also changed, with
710-638: A significant milestone. Subsequently, scheduled flights connecting Jaffna and Chennai commenced in November of the same year. These ventures and cooperative efforts work in tandem to reinforce the well-established people-to-people connections that exist between India and Sri Lanka. During World War II the British Royal Air Force built an airfield on 145 ha (359 acres ) of land in Palaly near Kankesanthurai in northern Ceylon . The airfield's runway
781-620: A small number speak the language. In Reunion where the Tamil language was forbidden to be learnt and used in public space by France it is now being relearnt by students and adults. Tamil is also spoken by migrants from Sri Lanka and India in Canada , the United States , the United Arab Emirates , the United Kingdom , South Africa , and Australia . Tamil is the official language of
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#1732869492658852-595: A subject of study in schools in the French overseas department of Réunion . In addition, with the creation in October 2004 of a legal status for classical languages by the Government of India and following a political campaign supported by several Tamil associations, Tamil became the first legally recognised Classical language of India. The recognition was announced by the contemporaneous President of India , Abdul Kalam , who
923-502: A suitable standard for passenger aircraft. Redevelopment of the airport began in July 2019 with the extension of the runway from 950 metres to 1,400 metres (phase 1), allowing it to handle aircraft with a seating capacity of up to 75. The Road Development Authority was given the task of constructing the new apron , taxiway and roads and overlaying the runway. The state-owned Airport and Aviation Services (AAS) were responsible for constructing
994-458: A variety of dialects that are all collectively known as Brahmin Tamil . These dialects tend to have softer consonants (with consonant deletion also common). These dialects also tend to have many Sanskrit loanwords. Tamil in Sri Lanka incorporates loan words from Portuguese , Dutch , and English. In addition to its dialects, Tamil exhibits different forms: a classical literary style modelled on
1065-438: A vowel). In other Indic scripts, it is generally preferred to use a ligature or a half form to write a syllable or a cluster containing a dead consonant, although writing it with a visible virama is also possible. The Tamil script does not differentiate voiced and unvoiced plosives . Instead, plosives are articulated with voice depending on their position in a word, in accordance with the rules of Tamil phonology . In addition to
1136-622: Is a Dravidian language natively spoken by the Tamil people of South Asia . It is one of the two longest-surviving classical languages in India , along with Sanskrit , attested since c. 300 BCE. The language belongs to the southern branch of the Dravidian language family and shares close ties with Malayalam and Kannada . Despite external influences, Tamil has retained a sense of linguistic purism, especially in formal and literary contexts. Tamil
1207-457: Is based on the dialect of Jaffna . After Tamil Brahmi fell out of use, Tamil was written using a script called vaṭṭeḻuttu amongst others such as Grantha and Pallava . The current Tamil script consists of 12 vowels , 18 consonants and one special character, the āytam . The vowels and consonants combine to form 216 compound characters, giving a total of 247 characters (12 + 18 + 1 + (12 × 18)). All consonants have an inherent vowel
1278-401: Is deemed unlikely by Southworth due to the contemporary use of the compound 'centamiḻ', which means refined speech in the earliest literature. The Tamil Lexicon of University of Madras defines the word "Tamil" as "sweetness". S. V. Subramanian suggests the meaning "sweet sound", from tam – "sweet" and il – "sound". Tamil belongs to the southern branch of the Dravidian languages ,
1349-778: Is expected to be extended to 2,300 metres in phase 2. This will allow the airport to handle 150-seater aircraft such as the Airbus A320 and Airbus A321 , enabling flights to other parts of Asia and Europe. Phase 3 will see the runway extended to 3,200 metres, capable of accommodating 200-seater aircraft. Flights were suspended after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in Sri Lanka , but resumed in December 2022 between Jaffna and Chennai. Tamil language Sri Lanka Singapore Malaysia Canada and United States Tamil ( தமிழ் , Tamiḻ , pronounced [t̪amiɻ] )
1420-563: Is extensively described in the oldest known grammar book for Tamil, the Tolkāppiyam . Modern Tamil writing is largely based on the 13th-century grammar Naṉṉūl which restated and clarified the rules of the Tolkāppiyam , with some modifications. Traditional Tamil grammar consists of five parts, namely eḻuttu , col , poruḷ , yāppu , aṇi . Of these, the last two are mostly applied in poetry. Tamil words consist of
1491-501: Is found in Tholkappiyam , which is dated as early as late 2nd century BCE. The Hathigumpha inscription , inscribed around a similar time period (150 BCE), by Kharavela , the Jain king of Kalinga , also refers to a Tamira Samghatta ( Tamil confederacy ) The Samavayanga Sutra dated to the 3rd century BCE contains a reference to a Tamil script named 'Damili'. Southworth suggests that
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#17328694926581562-405: Is generally taken to have been completed by the 8th century, was characterised by a number of phonological and grammatical changes. In phonological terms, the most important shifts were the virtual disappearance of the aytam (ஃ), an old phoneme, the coalescence of the alveolar and dental nasals, and the transformation of the alveolar plosive into a rhotic . In grammar, the most important change
1633-409: Is generally used in formal writing and speech. For instance, it is the language of textbooks, of much of Tamil literature and of public speaking and debate. In recent times, however, koṭuntamiḻ has been making inroads into areas that have traditionally been considered the province of centamiḻ . Most contemporary cinema, theatre and popular entertainment on television and radio, for example,
1704-410: Is in koṭuntamiḻ , and many politicians use it to bring themselves closer to their audience. The increasing use of koṭuntamiḻ in modern times has led to the emergence of unofficial 'standard' spoken dialects. In India, the 'standard' koṭuntamiḻ , rather than on any one dialect, but has been significantly influenced by the dialects of Thanjavur and Madurai . In Sri Lanka, the standard
1775-771: Is not always consistently applied. ISO 15919 is an international standard for the transliteration of Tamil and other Indic scripts into Latin characters. It uses diacritics to map the much larger set of Brahmic consonants and vowels to Latin script , and thus the alphabets of various languages, including English. Apart from the usual numerals, Tamil has numerals for 10, 100 and 1000. Symbols for day, month, year, debit, credit, as above, rupee, and numeral are present as well. Tamil also uses several historical fractional signs. /f/ , /z/ , /ʂ/ and /ɕ/ are only found in loanwords and may be considered marginal phonemes, though they are traditionally not seen as fully phonemic. Tamil has two diphthongs : /aɪ̯/ ஐ and /aʊ̯/ ஔ ,
1846-577: Is predominantly spoken in Tamil Nadu , India, and the Northern and Eastern provinces of Sri Lanka . It has significant speaking populations in Malaysia , Singapore , and among diaspora communities . Tamil has been recognized as a classical language by the Indian government and holds official status in Tamil Nadu, Puducherry and Singapore. The earliest extant Tamil literary works and their commentaries celebrate
1917-409: Is the Tolkāppiyam , an early work on Tamil grammar and poetics, whose oldest layers could be as old as the late 2nd century BCE. Many literary works in Old Tamil have also survived. These include a corpus of 2,381 poems collectively known as Sangam literature . These poems are usually dated to between the 1st century BCE and 5th century CE. The evolution of Old Tamil into Middle Tamil , which
1988-772: Is used as one of the languages of education in Malaysia , along with English, Malay and Mandarin. A large community of Pakistani Tamils speakers exists in Karachi , Pakistan , which includes Tamil-speaking Hindus as well as Christians and Muslims – including some Tamil-speaking Muslim refugees from Sri Lanka. There are about 100 Tamil Hindu families in Madrasi Para colony in Karachi. They speak impeccable Tamil along with Urdu, Punjabi and Sindhi. Many in Réunion , Guyana , Fiji , Suriname , and Trinidad and Tobago have Tamil origins, but only
2059-524: The Eelam People's Revolutionary Liberation Front escaped to Colombo via Palaly airport. They were each charged Rs. 5,000 by the SLAF - a standard return flight cost only Rs. 3,000 at that time. During the early 1990s the airport and surrounding areas were declared a High Security Zone and all the residents were expelled. Between 1990 and 1995 this High Security Zone was the only government controlled territory on
2130-458: The Pandiyan Kings for the organization of long-termed Tamil Sangams , which researched, developed and made amendments in Tamil language. Even though the name of the language which was developed by these Tamil Sangams is mentioned as Tamil, the period when the name "Tamil" came to be applied to the language is unclear, as is the precise etymology of the name. The earliest attested use of the name
2201-586: The Sri Lankan military during the civil war . The army forcibly seized 261 ha (646 acres ) of neighbouring land in 1985. Following the signing of the Indo-Sri Lanka Accord in July 1987 the Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF) used Palaly to transport troops between India and Sri Lanka. On 5 October 1987 around a dozen members of the rebel Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), whom
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2272-493: The Sri Lankan military were going to fly to Colombo to face criminal charges related to killing rival Tamil militants , committed suicide on the tarmac at Palaly airport by consuming cyanide capsules . Among the dead were two senior LTTE commanders - Kumarappa (Jaffna commander) and Pulendran (Trincomalee commander). In 1989, as the IPKF were preparing to withdraw from Sri Lanka, paramilitaries belonging to Indian backed groups such as
2343-584: The University of Madras , was one of the earliest dictionaries published in Indian languages. A strong strain of linguistic purism emerged in the early 20th century, culminating in the Pure Tamil Movement which called for removal of all Sanskritic elements from Tamil. It received some support from Dravidian parties . This led to the replacement of a significant number of Sanskrit loanwords by Tamil equivalents, though many others remain. According to
2414-751: The Valikamam region. After the Valikamam was recaptured by the Sri Lankan military in 1995 the airport served as a vital link to the rest of the country as the land route was controlled by the LTTE. The SLAF then started a regular service between Palaly and Colombo. The SLAF's Helitours arm provided civilian flights using aircraft and crew leased from the former Soviet Union . Lionair started operating flights for civilians between Palaly and Ratmalana in August 1996, taking over from
2485-612: The control tower , terminal building, fire brigade facilities, office complex and air navigation systems. In early October 2019 the airport was made a regional airport, renamed Jaffna International Airport and placed under the jurisdiction of the CAA. AAS were appointed operator of the civilian side of the airport. The renovated airport was opened by President Maithripala Sirisena and Prime Minister Wickremesinghe on 17 October 2019. The arrival of an Alliance Air ATR 72-600 aircraft from Chennai carrying airline officials and journalists signalled
2556-486: The 11th century, retain many features of the Vaishnava paribasai , a special form of Tamil developed in the 9th and 10th centuries that reflect Vaishnavite religious and spiritual values. Several castes have their own sociolects which most members of that caste traditionally used regardless of where they come from. It is often possible to identify a person's caste by their speech. For example, Tamil Brahmins tend to speak
2627-551: The CAA announced that the flights would begin on 10 November 2019. Alliance Air commenced thrice weekly flights from Chennai to Jaffna on 11 November 2019. FitsAir had said that they would operate charter flights to Chennai from 8 November 2019 and charter flights to Tiruchirappalli International Airport from 10 November 2019. The Sri Lankan government has stated that the airport would also have flights to other Indian destinations - Bangalore , Cochin , Hyderabad and Mumbai . Flights to Maldives have also been mooted. The runway
2698-581: The Indian consul in Jaffna to upgrade Palaly Airport. The appeal was forwarded to the Government of India , and after approval by the Prime Minister of India , negotiations began with the Government of Sri Lanka (GoSL). In late 2015 GoSL gave approval for an agreement between the two countries to upgrade the airport. The agreement met with resistance from civil servants in Colombo who feared that any development of
2769-476: The Indian state of Haryana , purportedly as a rebuff to Punjab , though there was no attested Tamil-speaking population in the state, and was later replaced by Punjabi , in 2010. In Malaysia, 543 primary education government schools are available fully in Tamil as the medium of instruction . The establishment of Tamil-medium schools has been in process in Myanmar to provide education completely in Tamil language by
2840-469: The Indian state of Tamil Nadu and one of the 22 languages under schedule 8 of the constitution of India . It is one of the official languages of the union territories of Puducherry and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands . Tamil is also one of the official languages of Singapore . Tamil is one of the official and national languages of Sri Lanka, along with Sinhala . It was once given nominal official status in
2911-418: The SLAF, and doubled fares. Lionair had a profitable monopoly until March 1998 when Monara Airlines started flights on the same route. Monara suspended its services on 16 September 1998 after receiving threats from the LTTE for carrying military personnel. On 29 September 1998 Lionair Flight 602 left the airport around 1.48pm bound for Ratmalana Airport. At 2.10 pm it was reported missing. Locals reported seeing
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2982-490: The TNA demanded that Palaly be redeveloped into an international airport. In order to overcome communal objections from southern officials Wickremesinghe gave a commitment that Ratmalana Airport would become an international airport at the same time as Palaly Airport. The CAA agreed to give permission on condition that Palaly only serves as a regional airport (i.e. no long-haul flights) and that any Indian financial assistance would in
3053-585: The Tamil language, Kannada still preserves a lot from its roots. As part of the southern family of Indian languages and situated relatively close to the northern parts of India, Kannada also shares some Sanskrit words, similar to Malayalam. Many of the formerly used words in Tamil have been preserved with little change in Kannada. This shows a relative parallel to Tamil, even as Tamil has undergone some changes in modern ways of speaking. According to Hindu legend, Tamil or in personification form Tamil Thāi (Mother Tamil)
3124-673: The Tamils who settled there 200 years ago. Tamil language is available as a course in some local school boards and major universities in Canada and the month of January has been declared "Tamil Heritage Month" by the Parliament of Canada . Tamil enjoys a special status of protection under Article 6(b), Chapter 1 of the Constitution of South Africa and is taught as a subject in schools in KwaZulu-Natal province. Recently, it has been rolled out as
3195-459: The airport provided domestic flights to Colombo (Ratmalana) and Trincomalee , and international flights to south India (Madras and Tiruchirappalli ). Locals used the airport when visiting south India for cultural, educational and religious reasons while local politicians and officials used the airport for travelling to Colombo. Each year government employees would request three railway warrants for journeys between Kankesanthurai and Galle ,
3266-442: The ancient language ( sankattamiḻ ), a modern literary and formal style ( centamiḻ ), and a modern colloquial form ( koṭuntamiḻ ). These styles shade into each other, forming a stylistic continuum. For example, it is possible to write centamiḻ with a vocabulary drawn from caṅkattamiḻ , or to use forms associated with one of the other variants while speaking koṭuntamiḻ . In modern times, centamiḻ
3337-670: The culture associated with the Neolithic complexes of South India, but it has also been related to the Harappan civilization . Scholars categorise the attested history of the language into three periods: Old Tamil (300 BCE–700 CE), Middle Tamil (700–1600) and Modern Tamil (1600–present). About of the approximately 100,000 inscriptions found by the Archaeological Survey of India in India are in Tamil Nadu. Of them, most are in Tamil, with only about 5 percent in other languages. In 2004,
3408-936: The dialect of Madurai , and iṅkaṭe in some northern dialects. Even now, in the Coimbatore area, it is common to hear " akkaṭṭa " meaning "that place". Although Tamil dialects do not differ significantly in their vocabulary, there are a few exceptions. The dialects spoken in Sri Lanka retain many words and grammatical forms that are not in everyday use in India, and use many other words slightly differently. Tamil dialects include Central Tamil dialect , Kongu Tamil , Madras Bashai , Madurai Tamil , Nellai Tamil , Kumari Tamil in India ; Batticaloa Tamil dialect , Jaffna Tamil dialect , Negombo Tamil dialect in Sri Lanka; and Malaysian Tamil in Malaysia. Sankethi dialect in Karnataka has been heavily influenced by Kannada . The dialect of
3479-399: The differences between Tamil and Malayalam demonstrate a pre-historic divergence of the western dialect, the process of separation into a distinct language, Malayalam, was not completed until sometime in the 13th or 14th century. Additionally Kannada is also relatively close to the Tamil language and shares the format of the formal ancient Tamil language. While there are some variations from
3550-634: The district of Palakkad in Kerala has many Malayalam loanwords, has been influenced by Malayalam's syntax, and has a distinctive Malayalam accent. Similarly, Tamil spoken in Kanyakumari District has more unique words and phonetic style than Tamil spoken at other parts of Tamil Nadu. The words and phonetics are so different that a person from Kanyakumari district is easily identifiable by their spoken Tamil. Hebbar and Mandyam dialects, spoken by groups of Tamil Vaishnavites who migrated to Karnataka in
3621-508: The form of grants rather than loans. In the meantime civil society groups from eastern Sri Lanka complained to the Indian consul in Jaffna that Indian development work was only focussed on the north and ignored the east. The Indian government agreed to redevelop Batticaloa Airport and the Sri Lankan government agreed to make it an international airport as well. Although Palaly Airport had a 2,300-metre runway only 950 metres had been refurbished to
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#17328694926583692-699: The hill country . Tamil or dialects of it were used widely in the state of Kerala as the major language of administration, literature and common usage until the 12th century CE. Tamil was also used widely in inscriptions found in southern Andhra Pradesh districts of Chittoor and Nellore until the 12th century CE. Tamil was used for inscriptions from the 10th through 14th centuries in southern Karnataka districts such as Kolar , Mysore , Mandya and Bengaluru . There are currently sizeable Tamil-speaking populations descended from colonial-era migrants in Malaysia , Singapore , Philippines , Mauritius , South Africa , Indonesia, Thailand, Burma , and Vietnam . Tamil
3763-406: The inauguration of Sri Lanka's third international airport. This was also Alliance Air's first overseas flight. The renovations cost Rs 2.25 billion of which Rs 1.95 billion was funded by the Sri Lankan government and Rs 0.3 billion from the Indian government. Alliance Air was expected to run scheduled flights from Chennai to Jaffna three times a week from 1 November 2019. However, on 1 November 2019
3834-432: The introduction of new aspectual auxiliaries and more complex sentence structures, and with the emergence of a more rigid word order that resembles the syntactic argument structure of English. In 1578, Portuguese Christian missionaries published a Tamil prayer book in old Tamil script named Thambiran Vanakkam , thus making Tamil the first Indian language to be printed and published. The Tamil Lexicon , published by
3905-456: The latter of which is restricted to a few lexical items. Tamil employs agglutinative grammar, where suffixes are used to mark noun class , number , and case , verb tense and other grammatical categories. Tamil's standard metalinguistic terminology and scholarly vocabulary is itself Tamil, as opposed to the Sanskrit that is standard for most Indo-Aryan languages . Much of Tamil grammar
3976-507: The longest and costliest rail journey possible, and exchange these for air tickets between Palaly and Ratmalana. Air Ceylon's Douglas DC-3 , Avro HS-748 and Nord 262 planes operated out of the airport. The growth of Tamil militancy put an end to civilian flights at the airport. A Sri Lanka Air Force (SLAF) detachment moved onto the site around 1976. The site became an Air Field Unit in January 1982. The airport served as major facility for
4047-423: The name comes from tam-miḻ > tam-iḻ "self-speak", or "our own speech". Kamil Zvelebil suggests an etymology of tam-iḻ , with tam meaning "self" or "one's self", and " -iḻ " having the connotation of "unfolding sound". Alternatively, he suggests a derivation of tamiḻ < tam-iḻ < * tav-iḻ < * tak-iḻ , meaning in origin "the proper process (of speaking)". However, this
4118-502: The north would be at the expense of the south. Some Tamil politicians also opposed the plans, claiming that any development of the airport would result in further acquisition of civilian land. However, with increasing pressure from the TNA, the Indian government decided to go ahead with the redevelopment. Officials from Chennai International Airport arrived at Palaly in March 2016 to carry out technical and feasibility studies and concluded that
4189-531: The old aspect and time markers. The Nannūl remains the standard normative grammar for modern literary Tamil, which therefore continues to be based on Middle Tamil of the 13th century rather than on Modern Tamil. Colloquial spoken Tamil, in contrast, shows a number of changes. The negative conjugation of verbs, for example, has fallen out of use in Modern Tamil – instead, negation is expressed either morphologically or syntactically. Modern spoken Tamil also shows
4260-547: The plane plunge into the sea near Iranaitivu , 15 km (9 mi ) north of Mannar . All 55 on board were killed. The LTTE was accused of shooting down the flight. Lionair suspended flights to Palaly immediately. Following the Norwegian facilitated ceasefire, civilian flights resumed from Palaly in June 2002 when ExpoAir started operating flights between Palaly and Ratmalana. The flights became very popular and at its peak ExpoAir
4331-522: The redevelopment could be carried out without any further acquisition of civilian land. Detailed plans were drawn up but the Civil Aviation Authority of Sri Lanka (CAA), fearing that any direct international flights to Palaly would cause Bandaranaike International Airport 's income to fall, denied permission. By late 2018 Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe 's minority government had become reliant on TNA support to stay in power. In return,
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#17328694926584402-465: The standard characters, six characters taken from the Grantha script , which was used in the Tamil region to write Sanskrit, are sometimes used to represent sounds not native to Tamil, that is, words adopted from Sanskrit, Prakrit , and other languages. The traditional system prescribed by classical grammars for writing loan-words, which involves respelling them in accordance with Tamil phonology, remains, but
4473-517: The word for "here"— iṅku in Centamil (the classic variety)—has evolved into iṅkū in the Kongu dialect of Coimbatore , inga in the dialects of Thanjavur and Palakkad , and iṅkai in some dialects of Sri Lanka . Old Tamil's iṅkaṇ (where kaṇ means place) is the source of iṅkane in the dialect of Tirunelveli , Old Tamil iṅkiṭṭu is the source of iṅkuṭṭu in
4544-526: Was a Tamilian himself, in a joint sitting of both houses of the Indian Parliament on 6 June 2004. The socio-linguistic situation of Tamil is characterised by diglossia : there are two separate registers varying by socioeconomic status , a high register and a low one. Tamil dialects are primarily differentiated from each other by the fact that they have undergone different phonological changes and sound shifts in evolving from Old Tamil. For example,
4615-479: Was around 2,000 m (6,562 ft ) long. A number of RAF squadrons ( 160 , 203 , 292 , 354 ) and air-sea rescue units were stationed at the airfield during and immediately after the war. The airfield was abandoned after the war and taken over by the Department of Civil Aviation . The inaugural flight by Air Ceylon on 10 December 1947 was from Ratmalana Airport to Madras via Palaly. After independence
4686-586: Was claimed to be dated to around 580 BCE. John Guy states that Tamil was the lingua franca for early maritime traders from India. Tamil language inscriptions written in Brahmi script have been discovered in Sri Lanka and on trade goods in Thailand and Egypt. In November 2007, an excavation at Quseir-al-Qadim revealed Egyptian pottery dating back to first century BCE with ancient Tamil Brahmi inscriptions. There are
4757-528: Was created by Lord Shiva . Murugan , revered as the Tamil God, along with sage Agastya , brought it to the people. Tamil, like other Dravidian languages, ultimately descends from the Proto-Dravidian language , which was most likely spoken around the third millennium BCE, possibly in the region around the lower Godavari river basin. The material evidence suggests that the speakers of Proto-Dravidian were of
4828-441: Was operating four flights a day using two 52-seater Fokker F27-500 planes. ExpoAir suspended services in 2010 due to a drop in demand but services resumed again in January 2012. The airline operated two return flights a day using a 12-seater Cessna Grand Caravan . A new passenger terminal was opened on 4 January 2013. In 2014 Tamil National Alliance (TNA) MP Mavai Senathirajah , who is from nearby Maviddapuram , appealed to
4899-650: Was originally built by the Royal Air Force during World War II , after which it functioned as the country's second international airport. It was taken over by the Sri Lanka Air Force during the Sri Lankan Civil War . Domestic civilian flights resumed in the mid-1990s and in 2019 it became Sri Lanka's third international airport. The inauguration of the Jaffna International Airport marked
4970-504: Was the lingua franca for early maritime traders, with inscriptions found in places like Sri Lanka , Thailand , and Egypt . The language has a well-documented history with literary works like Sangam literature , consisting of over 2,000 poems. Tamil script evolved from Tamil Brahmi, and later, the vatteluttu script was used until the current script was standardized. The language has a distinct grammatical structure, with agglutinative morphology that allows for complex word formations. Tamil
5041-451: Was the emergence of the present tense. The present tense evolved out of the verb kil ( கில் ), meaning "to be possible" or "to befall". In Old Tamil, this verb was used as an aspect marker to indicate that an action was micro-durative, non-sustained or non-lasting, usually in combination with a time marker such as ṉ ( ன் ). In Middle Tamil, this usage evolved into a present tense marker – kiṉṟa ( கின்ற ) – which combined
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