Harman Patil (Editor)

Tamil Loanwords in other languages

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Tamil is an old language and due to its contact with the other languages from historical times, there are many loanwords from Tamil that are found in the other languages.

Contents

In English

Gregory James, a professor with the language center of Hong Kong University of Science and Technology believes that more than 100 words in the Oxford English Dictionary have Tamil origin, and there could be even more. The third edition of the OED, published online since 2000, contains approximately 400,000 words.

In Thai

The Thai language has many borrowed words the Tamil language.

In Indonesian

Loanwords from Tamil, mainly exist in cuisine, like Chinese and unlike Sanskrit. It mainly entered the lexicon of Malay (and by extension, Indonesian) with the immigration of South Indian traders who settled around the Strait of Malacca.

In Sinhala

Sinhala words of Tamil origin came about as part of the more than 2,000 years of language interactions between Sinhala and Tamil in the island of Sri Lanka.

In Sinhala words

In the following list, Tamil words are romanised in accordance with Tamil spelling. This results in seeming discrepancies in voicing between Sinhala words and their Tamil counterparts. Sinhala borrowing however has taken place on the basis of the sound of the Tamil words; thus, the word ampalam, [ambalam], logically results in the Sinhala spelling ambalama, and so forth. However, the Tamil language used here for comparison is Tamil as spoken in Sri Lanka.

In Sinhala verbs

Several verbs have been adopted into Sinhala from the Tamil language. The vast majority of these are compound verbs consisting of a Tamil origin primary verb and a Sinhala origin light verb.

References

Tamil Loanwords in other languages Wikipedia