Index of Ramacaritam constitutes the second part of my Ph.D. dissertation entitled Grammar of Ramacaritam which was prepared under the supervision of V.I. Subramoniam, Professor and Head of the Department of Linguistics, University of Kerala during the period 1973-76. Due to financial hurdles, I could not publish the entire dissertation in a book form. Even then, I published certain articles based on this study, in Malayalam journals and a few in book form. For instance, Ramacarita Pathanattinoramukham ('An Introduction to the Study of Ramacaritam') published in 2012 by Kerala Sahitya Akademi consists of the major issues analyzed in the grammar part of the thesis.
I acknowledge my indebtedness to the Council of Direction of the International School of Dravidian Linguistics who took the initiative to publish the index part of the thesis taking into consideration the linguistic value of Ramacaritam which exhibits the early phase of medieval Malayalam language. I am thankful to Prof. G.K. Panikkar, Director of the International School of Dravidian Linguistics and Dean, Dravidian Linguistics Association for his guidance and suggestions in identifying the linguistic features of the lexical items which were found wrongly segmented in the original work.
Let me record my deep sense of gratitude to late Prof. V.I. Subramoniam, my supervising teacher, for his unstinted help and guidance in the study of Ramacaritam.
Ancient written records are a treasure-house for researchers in different disciplines such as history, culture studies, sociology, trade and commerce, linguistics, paleography etc. A written record can be any one of the documents scribed, chiselled or printed in a writing media. The writing media (surface) can be stone (rock), leather, earthenware, paper etc. Thus, all types of inscriptions, manuscripts and printed texts come under written records.
There is a view that the written variety is not the true representation of a language but only the spoken variety is the real language. At any point of time, written language and spoken language are not identical and variations do occur. To start with, written language needs to be considered as a permanent record of the spoken language and hence may not have exhibited much difference between the two. All languages are susceptible to changes due to span of time. However, such changes first occur in the spoken language, and written variety is not usually affected by such changes as and when they occur to the spoken variety since written language is more conservative. Thus, the changes occurring in the spoken language, generally speaking, may be carried over to the written language only after a time lag. In short, most of the changes affecting the spoken language will be accommodated in the written language also but usually only after hundreds of years. Whatever it may be, the written documents do represent the language, and the linguistic features exhibited in them are the characteristics once existed in that language. Thus, for any study on the history and development of a language, the written (printed) materials belonging to different periods are very much needed.
The written records including inscriptions, manuscripts, printed texts etc., are valuable source materials for tracing the cultural, social, political and economic history of the people of a region or country. In addition, such records are the most authentic data for linguists to do research on various aspects of the language in which they are interested. Without such written records, it is almost impossible to trace the historical development of any language. The sound changes, changes in the grammatical structure, addition, omission and modifications in shape (shape change) etc., occurring to lexical items at different periods of time will be reflected in the ancient records; vast majority of them are literary works and hence their word indices are highly essential for any research in historical linguistics.
In tracing the history of the development of any language or for any synchronic study of language at a given period, either modern or ancient, we require sufficient language corpus. The ancient written documents represented mainly by literary works provide ample linguistic data. The word indices of ancient works belonging to different periods pointing out the meaning and the grammatical category of each entry are useful for linguists for checking the grammar, to understand the semantic expansion, semantic contraction, shift in meanings, loss of some lexical items which were found in the earlier works, addition of new lexical items etc., at different periods of time. The lexical items bearing historical and cultural significance, terms on customs and practices etc., are of immense value to the researchers from other branches of knowledge also.
The index also helps as an easy and ready means of ascertaining whether a given form occurs in a particular period or in a particular text, and if it occurs, where exactly it comes etc. It is also useful for the editors of literary works where the authorship is uncertain, by adopting the frequency of vocabulary used as a useful tool for deciding the authorship. The indices of ancient texts are also useful for collecting terms related to cultural objects, society, religion, names of things, places etc. Thus, the importance of index is many-fold.
For preparing the present index, the base material was A Descriptive Grammar of Ramacaritam by Prof. Naduvattom Gopalakrishnan for which he was awarded Ph.D. degree from the University of Kerala. The International School of Dravidian Linguistics has an ambitious project through which the word indices denoting meaning and grammatical categories of all ancient works of Malayalam are to be prepared and to get them published. The main aim of this project, as far as the ISDL is concerned, is to prepare a historical grammar for Malayalam language. Tracing the history of Malayalam language, one has to begin from the Sangam period. Fortunately, for most of the Sangam works, indices are available.
The Index of Ramacaritam is a valuable source material towards this goal. Hope this publication will be of immense help not only for the researchers of Malayalam language but also for the researchers on Tamil language and also for Tamil-Malayalam comparative studies.
**Contents and Sample Pages**
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