Conclusions

Having presented a rather scathing criticism of native and missionary grammarians' attempts to deal with the Tamil Case System, and having reviewed various problems that need to be dealt with, I am convinced that a taxonomic approach that attempts to categorize case morphemes on the one hand and postpositional morphemes on the other is missing the point. Obviously the whole system must be treated in its entirety, since when all the morphemes in question are viewed in toto, what emerges is an overall system consisting of (1) an inner core of indisputably bound case morphemes, (2) an intermediate layer of case/postpositional morphemes, (3) and an outer layer of morphemes that occur elsewhere in the language. The Tamil Case System is a kind of continuum or polarity, with the `true' case-like morphemes found at one end of the continuum, with less case-like but still bound morphemes next, followed by the commonly recognized postpositions, then finally nominal and verbal expressions that are synonymous with postpositions but not usually recognized as such at the other extreme. This results in a kind of `dendritic' system, with most, but not all, of the basic case nodes capable of being extended in various directions, sometimes overlapping with others, to produce a thicket of branches. The overlap, of course, results from the fact that some postpositions can occur after more than one case, usually with a slight difference in meaning, so that an either-or taxonomy simply does not capture the whole picture.

I am also tempted to compare Dravidian case systems with those of the Altaic languages, which on typological and perhaps even historical grounds, show strong similarities. It is interesting to note that the genitive case, for which no satisfactory analysis emerges in Dravidian, is also a problem in Altaic languages, and is in fact not usually treated as a case in Proto-Altaic. Altaic languages are thus shown to have four cases at the `core', as it were, with other accretions similar to those found also in Dravidian. I do believe it is high time to abandon the rigid seven or eight-case system since doubts about its validity have been voiced since the earliest analyses of Tamil began, and the problems with it can be seen to be growing worse rather than better. Such a system also works poorly for the other Dravidian languages, as is obvious from the most cursory glance at the present-day grammars of Malayalam, Kannada and Telugu. It is also high time that Tamil scholars collaborated on a modern description of both Literary and Spoken Tamil that corresponds to the facts of the language, rather than to some outdated notion borrowed from another time and grammatical tradition.