SACE Stage 2 Tamil (continuers) key terms

The Dravidian language of the exam, written in its own script and spoken across Tamil Nadu, Sri Lanka, Singapore and Malaysia, with a continuous literary record of more than two thousand years.

Grammar: the system of rules describing how Tamil sounds, words and sentences are formed and combined, traditionally taught through the threefold scheme of letters, words and meaning.

Literature: imaginative and artistic writing in Tamil, including poetry, epic, novel, short story and drama, valued for both aesthetic form and the cultural values it carries.

The oldest surviving Tamil grammatical and poetic treatise, traditionally attributed to Tolkappiyar, organised into sections on letters, words and literary meaning, and a foundation of classical Tamil scholarship.

A medieval Tamil grammar by Pavanandi that restates and refines earlier grammatical tradition in concise verses, widely used as a standard reference for formal grammar.

The classical Tamil literary academy and the body of poetry associated with it, comprising anthologies of love and war poems composed roughly between the third century BCE and the third century CE.

The 'inner' theme of classical Tamil poetry, concerned with love, courtship and family life, in which the persons are generalised rather than named as individuals.

The 'outer' theme of classical Tamil poetry, treating public life such as war, kingship, generosity and ethics, with named heroes and historical settings.

A classical Tamil poetic category that classifies a poem by its landscape and emotional situation, such as mountains, forest, farmland, seashore or wasteland, each linked to particular feelings.

A classical Tamil work of ethical couplets by Thiruvalluvar, arranged in three books on virtue, wealth and love, each verse a compact statement of moral or practical wisdom.

A long narrative epic poem in Tamil, typically celebrating a heroic or divine figure across many cantos and blending legend, morality and elaborate description.

A major Tamil epic by Ilango Adigal telling of Kannagi's pursuit of justice after her husband's wrongful death, celebrated for its vivid portrayal of city and court life.

A commentary or prose explanation of a text, a recognised scholarly genre in Tamil that interprets difficult verses and supplies context, vocabulary and doctrinal clarification.

A word, and in Tamil grammar one of the four traditional classes of words, distinguished by whether they name a thing, an action, a quality or an uninflected particle.

A noun: a word that names a person, place, thing or abstract idea, and that in Tamil takes case endings to show its grammatical role in a sentence.

A verb: a word expressing an action, state or occurrence, carrying in Tamil the information about tense, person, number and sometimes gender through its endings.

A class of Tamil word that qualifies a noun or verb by describing a quality or manner, traditionally treated as a distinct part of speech in native grammar.

The system of Tamil grammatical cases, numbering eight, which mark how a noun relates to the verb, such as subject, object, instrument, place or possession.

A case marker or suffix attached to a noun stem to signal its grammatical relationship, an element central to correct Tamil sentence construction.

Tense: the grammatical marking of past, present and future in a verb, expressed in Tamil through particular suffixes placed between the root and the personal ending.

A verb ending that follows the tense marker and indicates person, number and sometimes gender, completing the finite verb form.

A letter or written character of the Tamil script, conventionally classified into vowels, consonants and a special pure consonant form.

A vowel letter in Tamil, of which there are twelve, written independently when it begins a syllable and combined with consonants elsewhere.

A consonant letter in Tamil, of which there are eighteen, representing basic consonantal sounds that combine with vowel signs to form full syllables.

A combined Tamil letter in which a consonant carries a vowel sign, producing an entire syllable such as a consonant plus a short or long vowel.

The dot placed above a Tamil consonant to show that it is pronounced without any following vowel, as in the pure consonant forms used at syllable ends.

A classical Tamil text of 1330 short couplets by Thiruvalluvar, organised into chapters on virtue, wealth and love, and frequently set for study and memorisation.

Meaning: the sense conveyed by a word, sentence or literary work, and the third division of classical Tamil grammar, treating theme and content.

A simile: an explicit comparison of one thing to another, usually introduced by a word meaning 'like' or 'as', a common device in Tamil poetry.

A metaphor: a figure in which one thing is described directly as another without an explicit word of comparison, creating a fused image.

A rhetorical figure or ornament of style, such as simile, metaphor or alliteration, used to heighten the expressive effect of literary language.

Poetry: verse composition in Tamil, characterised by metre, rhythm and condensed imagery, ranging from classical anthologies to modern free verse.

A short story: a brief prose narrative in Tamil, usually focused on a single incident or turning point and a small cast of characters.

A novel: an extended prose narrative in Tamil, developing plot, character and setting at length and often reflecting social change.

Drama: a work written for performance in Tamil, built from dialogue and stage directions and intended to be enacted before an audience.

An essay: a piece of continuous prose in Tamil that develops a viewpoint or explains a topic, usually with an introduction, body and conclusion.

A dialogue or conversation, either a spoken exchange between characters in a text or the interactive speaking task in which candidates discuss a topic.