TAMILS, the Sanskrit generic appellation for the south Indian peoples and their languages, which passed through vari ous stages—Dravida, Dramida, Dramila, Damila. Bishop Cald well fully explains this in his Comparative Grammar of the Dra vidian Languages (2nd ed., 1875, p. 10 seq.). The term Tamulic or Tamulian has occasionally been employed as the designation of the whole class of Dravidian peoples and languages. The Tamils proper are smaller and of weaker build than Europeans, though graceful in shape. The hair is plentiful, and occasionally curly. The skin varies from brown to black. Of medium stature, they are in general long headed with medium noses. They are enterprising, and wherever money is to be earned there will Tamils be found, either as merchants or in the capacity of domes tic servants and labourers. The tea and coffee districts of Ceylon are peopled by about 950,00o; Tamils serve as coolies in the Mauritius and the West Indies; in Burma, the Straits, and Siam the so-called Klings are all Tamils. They have settlements in East and South Africa.
The modern Tamil characters originated "in a Brahmanical adaptation of the old Grantha letters corresponding to the so called Vatteluttu," or round-hand, an alphabet once in vogue throughout the whole of the Pandyan kingdom, as well as in the South Malabar and Coimbatore districts, and still sparsely used for drawing up conveyances and other legal instruments. It is
also used by the Moplahs in Tellicherry, while in Malabar it con tinued in general use down to the end of the 17th century. Th? modern Tamil characters, which have changed but little for the last 500 years, differ from all the other modern Dravidian alpha bets both in shape and in their phonetic value. Their angular form is said to be due to the widespread practice of writing with the style resting on the end of the left thumb-nail, while the other alphabets are written with the style resting on the left side of the thumb.
The Tamil alphabet is sufficiently well adapted for the expres sion of the twelve vowels of the language (a, a, i, e, e, 0, ei, au),—the occasional sounds of ö and ii, both short and long, being covered by the signs for e, i, but it is utterly inadequate for the proper expression of the consonants, inasmuch as the one character k has to do duty also for kh, g, gh, and simi larly each of the other surd consonants ch, t, t, p represents also the remaining three letters of its respective class. The letter k has, besides, occasionally the sound of h, and ch that of s. Each of the five consonants k, ch, t, t, p has its own nasal. In addition to the four semivowels, the Tamil possesses a cerebral r and / and has retained a liquid k once peculiar to all the Dravidian lan guages, the sound of which varies in different districts. There is, lastly, a peculiar n, differing in function but not in pronunciation from the dental n. The three sibilants and h of Sanskrit have no place in the Tamil alphabet ; but ch often does duty as a sibilant in writing foreign words, and the four corresponding letters as well as j and ksh of the Grantha alphabet are now frequently called to aid. Many of the Sanskrit words imported into Tamil at various periods have therefore assumed disguises under which the original is scarcely recognizable: examples are ulagu (loka), uruvam (rupa), arukken (arka), arputam (adbhutam), natchat tiram (nakshatram), irudi (rishi), tirkam (dirgha), arasen (rajan).