சிறுவர்க்கான செந்தமிழ்
7
sorts of people speaking all sorts of languages mix and mingle together, all those who speak Tamil speak it purely whether they be the born Tamils or others who have adopted it merely for social intercourse or business purposes. In the colloquial Tamil scarcely one percent of either Sanscrit or other foreign words mixes.
But the mischief that affects it badly comes mainly from the circle of English-knowing brahmin and non-brahmin officials, who speak neither pure Tamil nor pure English, but mix the two together so badly and ridiculously that neither a Tamilian nor an Englishman understands their language but turns aside with disgust. Besides introducing into their spoken and written Tamil many an English word and phrase, nay even whole sentences, the brahmins and their followers import into it Sanscrit and Hindustani terms also. This "constant degradation of language” in the words of Pater, "by those who use it carelessly," at present affects Tamil so wholly by the slipshod fashion in which it is handled by the so called educated people. Whether your speak English, or whether you speak Tamil or any other language, you must learn to use it in such a way as to make your ideas quite intelligible to the people who are born and bred in that language. The standard by which one ought to measure the nature and use of a language must be the extent of its usage among the largest portion of its people in the daily intercourse of their life. As the educated section forms a very small minority of almost all the people in the world, especially in this country not only is it an inconsiderable part, but it also concerns itself less about the welfare of the masses than its own, the present fashionable mode of their easy talk cannot, with any propriety, be taken as the standard for using a language like Tamil which has been cultivated for more than fifty centuries and is spoken still by more than twentyone millions in Southern India and Ceylon alone. As days advance with the spread of English education, the gulf between the educated and the uneducated Tamils also widens, their being little understanding between them and little sympathy with each other. The root-cause of this may, by all careful observers, be traced to the inadequate instruction imparted in Tamil to students reading from the High School to College classes. The object of the following treatise therefore is to remedy this defect at first by feeding properly the acquisition of the knowledge of
