International Journal of Language & Literature

Some Archaic Word forms Dropped by Jaffna Tamil Society
Ms Gevani Prahalathan

Abstract
The people of Jaffna are considered one of the archaic society which tries to maintain its social economic and cultural values even in the well advanced scientific and technological world. Though they maintain these values it is essential to undergo changes when world is advancing. These changes are reflected in their ceremonies, (birth, puberty, marriage and death which are the mile stones of the human life), trade, communication, profession etc. The archaic word forms that had been in use have been replaced by other words with the mixture of English, their second language. After the colonization there formed two societies called the English educated and the vernacular educated. The English educated were dominative and they were the ones who held the administrative posts. Their lives and life styles had been a model for the poor under privileged people and between these two extremes, formed a mixture of language. As some archaic forms were considered inferior and looked down upon, new ways of usage together with English vocabulary were used to express them. There hasn’t been any research done so far on the above title or in relation to this title. But some of the word forms have been used in some researches by some scholars such as S. Suseendiraraja (1997), K Navaratnam (1959), C Sivaratnam (1968) to express the culture and other aspects of the society. This paper gives a description of the Jaffna society and its culture now and then. This analysis gives a description of the archaic word forms used by the people belonging to the Hindu religion of the Vellala caste in the Jaffna society. The goal of this paper is to document and preserve the archaic spoken word forms that had been used by the Tamil Jaffna society and to bring out the cultural changes that the society had undergone due to the advancement of technology, education and fusion of cultures, as this is one of the less explored languages. Data were collected from the people of the second and third generation elder to me through interviews and also through reference of some books. This paper focuses mainly on the spoken word forms used among the Hindu Tamil Vellala society during their ceremonies like birth, puberty, marriage and death. This is the initial step taken by me and more researches could be done among the other caste, religion, profession, trade etc.

Full Text: PDF      DOI: 10.15640/ijll.v3n1a24