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Tolkāpiyam, the oldest known book written in Old Tamil, is believed to have been authored around 100 B.C. Although Tolkāpiyam deals with the grammar of Tamil, a language still spoken by Tamils today, this ancient text, along with other Old Tamil books, has remained largely undeciphered. The reason for this lies in the fact that the grammar of Old Tamil has not been fully comprehended. Previous attempts to decipher Tolkāpiyam have mostly involved making educated guesses about the meaning of a paragraph based on the meanings of individual words. In this paper, I reveal the grammatical system of Old Tamil, drawing from the grammar theory presented in Part 2 of Tolkāpiyam. Old Tamil, much like pre-medieval Korean, employs predicates as nouns. It features elements such as chosa (조사), verb endings, honorifics, and causative verb suffixes. Remarkably, Tolkāpiyam is structured following the Korean word order. The grammar of Old Tamil closely resembles that of modern Korean. As a demonstration that Koreans can decipher Tolkāpiyam without prior knowledge of ancient Tamil, relying on word meanings alone, I also provide a correct interpretation for several paragraphs in Part I (Phonology). These interpretations challenge previous misconceptions and affirm the validity of my paper's argument, highlighting the limitations of prior research.
Cho et al. (Wed,) studied this question.