Beginning with the Portuguese, Tamil was one of the first languages learned by Europeans in India, and was the first Indian language to have a moveable type-face cast, and books printed in it. Dictionaries of the language date from early Portuguese attempts, followed by German and English missionaries and by mother-tongue-speaking scholars up until the present. Unfortunately no English-Tamil dictionaries provide adequate information to non-mother-tongue speakers about verb class and transitivity specification, and none except those designed for tea and rubber planters give any spoken pronunciations, even though the spoken language is quite different from the Literary language. This project attempts to rectify this situation by seeking Tamil equivalents to English verbs from various sources: modern newspaper and creative-writing (novels and short-stories), film and media use (for Spoken), as well as information culled from previous dictionaries; to this we add verb class and transitivity specification, add entries for modern usage, and a spoken transliteration (and example sentences) where appropriate.
This dictionary, though not the first to rely on computer-production and control of Tamil data, will be the first new English-Tamil dictionary to appear in some time, and the first scholarly dictionary to include spoken material. Work on entering data for the letters A to Y (there are no entries under Z) is complete; it is now possible to extract entries and format them for printing with LaTeX, using fonts generated by Thomas Ridgeway using METAFONT. Before we produce a print version, however, we wish to put on-line what we have so far, in order to get the reactions of others.
Tamil consultants who have worked on this project so far include S. Palanisamy, a well-known Tamil poet who is a former Professor of English (for entries A to M); Dr. Vasu Renganathan, who worked on entries M to P, and is also responsible for controlling computerization; and Dr. Prathima Christdas, who has worked on entries R to W.
The National Endowment for the Humanities funded this project in the amount of $70,000 outright during the 1980's, and the Smithsonian Institution also granted rupee funds equivalent to $15,000 for part of the work done in India. A private grant from Mr. and Mrs. Pethi Velu was also used to carry out some work on data entry. The latest version of this project was funded by the Consortium for Language Teaching and Learning.
