Tolkāppiyam

''Tolkāppiyam'', also romanised as ''Tholkaappiyam'' ( , ''lit.'' "ancient poem"), is the oldest extant Tamil grammar text and the oldest extant long work of Tamil literature. It is the earliest Tamil text mentioning Gods, perhaps linked to Tamil deities. There is no firm evidence to assign the authorship of this treatise to any one author. There is a tradition of belief that it was written by a single author named Tolkappiyar, a disciple of Tamil sage Agathiyar.

The surviving manuscripts of the ''Tolkappiyam'' consists of three books (), each with nine chapters (), with a cumulative total of 1,610 (483+463+664) ''sutras'' in the meter.}} It is a comprehensive text on grammar, and includes ''sutras'' on orthography, phonology, etymology, morphology, semantics, prosody, sentence structure and the significance of context in language. Mayyon as (Vishnu), Seyyon as (Kanda), Vendhan as (Indra), Varuna as (Varuna) and Kotṟavai as (Devi or Bagavathi) are the gods mentioned.

The ''Tolkappiyam'' is difficult to date. Some in the Tamil tradition place the text in the historical Pandiya kingdom Second tamil sangam, variously in 1st millennium BCE or earlier. Scholars place the text much later and believe the text evolved and expanded over a period of time. According to Nadarajah Devapoopathy the earliest layer of the ''Tolkappiyam'' was likely composed between the 2nd and 1st century BCE, and the extant manuscript versions fixed by about the 5th century CE. The ''Tolkappiyam Ur-text'' likely relied on some unknown even older literature.

Iravatham Mahadevan dates the Tolkappiyam to no earlier than the 2nd century CE, as it mentions the being an integral part of Tamil script. The ''puḷḷi'' (a diacritical mark to distinguish pure consonants from consonants with inherent vowels) only became prevalent in Tamil epigraphs after the 2nd century CE. According to linguist S. Agesthialingam, Tolkappiyam contains many later interpolations, and the language shows many deviations consistent with late old Tamil (similar to Cilappatikaram), rather than the early Tamil poems of Eṭṭuttokai and Pattuppāṭṭu.

The ''Tolkappiyam'' contains aphoristic verses arranged into three books – the , the and the . The ''Tolkappiyam'' includes examples to explain its rules, and these examples provide indirect information about the ancient Tamil culture, sociology, and linguistic geography. It is first mentioned by name in Iraiyanar's ''Akapporul'' – a 7th- or 8th-century text – as an authoritative reference, and the ''Tolkappiyam'' remains the authoritative text on Tamil grammar. Causative stems of verb bases are "lexical in Old Tamil, morphological in Middle Tamil, and syntactic in Modern Tamil", for example, states Lehmann. Nevertheless, many features of Middle and Modern Tamil are anchored in the Old Tamil of ''Tolkappiyam''.}} Provided by Wikipedia