VCE Tamil flashcards
VCE Tamil · Build recall with a focused review session.
31 cards. Read the term and the definition here. The deck at the top of this page is optional.
- Akam and Puram
- Two divisions of Sangam Tamil poetry: akam treats inner, personal life and love, while puram treats outer, public life, war, ethics and praise of kings.
- Thinai classification
- Sangam poetics divides landscape and mood into five thinais: kurinji (hills, union), mullai (forest, waiting), marutham (fields, sulking), neythal (coast, separation) and paalai (desert, elopement).
- Senthamil versus kodunthamizh
- Senthamil is the formal literary register used in writing and public speech; kodunthamizh is the informal spoken register, differing in phonology, vocabulary and verb endings.
- Pure Tamil Movement
- The thanith thamizh iyakkam, associated with Maraimalai Adigal, sought to replace Sanskrit-derived vocabulary with native Tamil roots, shaping modern formal Tamil prose.
- Tamil agglutination
- Tamil builds words by adding suffixes to a root: verb roots take tense and person markers, and noun roots take case and plural markers, producing long single-word forms.
- Rational and irrational nouns
- Tamil noun classification: rational nouns cover humans and deities and take certain plural endings, while irrational nouns cover animals, objects and abstractions and take different endings.
- Case suffixes in Tamil
- Tamil marks grammatical case with suffixes: -ai accusative, -aal instrumental, -ku dative, -il locative, -ilirunthu ablative and -in genitive, often fused with the noun stem.
- Relative participle
- A Tamil verb form that modifies a following noun, such as vantha paiyan (the boy who came); tense is marked on the participle rather than in a separate clause.
- Verbal noun
- A Tamil noun derived from a verb root, such as varuthal (coming) or padiththal (studying), used to nominalise actions and to build complex sentences.
- Paaththiram
- The Tamil literary term for character; analysis considers motivation, development, relationships and how a character embodies or challenges the values of the text.
- Karuththu
- The Tamil term for theme or central idea; identifying karuththu requires linking recurring images, dialogue and plot events to an underlying message about society or human nature.
- Urainadai
- Tamil for prose style; analysis covers sentence length, vocabulary choice, use of dialect, imagery and rhetorical devices, and how style supports the text's purpose.
- Siledai
- Tamil for symbolism; a siledai reading identifies objects, colours or recurring images that carry meaning beyond their literal function in the narrative.
- Loanwords in Tamil
- Tamil has absorbed loanwords from Sanskrit, Prakrit, Portuguese, Dutch, English and Urdu; formal writing often substitutes native equivalents, while speech retains the loans.
- Tamil diglossia
- The stable coexistence of a high literary variety and a low colloquial variety, each with distinct domains of use, is the defining sociolinguistic feature of Tamil.
- Film text analysis
- Analysing a prescribed Tamil film requires attention to narrative structure, dialogue register, song lyrics, camera work, editing and the social issues the film represents.
- Little Magazine movement
- A twentieth-century Tamil literary movement that promoted experimental, socially critical writing outside mainstream publishing, influencing modern short fiction and poetry.
- Translation register
- When translating between Tamil and English, register, idiom, honorifics and culture-specific terms must be preserved rather than rendered word for word.
- Unit 3 Outcome 1
- A school-based assessment requiring a sustained analytical response in Tamil to a prescribed text, focusing on theme, character and technique.
- Unit 3 Outcome 2
- A school-based assessment requiring a creative, personal or imaginative response in Tamil, such as a diary entry, letter or additional scene linked to the prescribed text.
- Unit 4 Outcome 1
- A school-based assessment on a prescribed text or film, requiring detailed analysis of structure, style and the representation of social and cultural values.
- Unit 4 Outcome 2
- A school-based assessment on language variation and identity, requiring analysis of dialect, register or loanword use and of how language shapes cultural identity.
- Oral examination
- An external oral assessment, roughly ten to fifteen minutes, in which students discuss a detailed study and answer unfamiliar questions in fluent, accurate Tamil.
- Listening section
- Examination Section 1: students hear spoken Tamil texts and answer questions in Tamil, demonstrating comprehension of main ideas, detail and tone.
- Reading section
- Examination Section 2: students read unseen Tamil texts and a prescribed text extract, then answer in Tamil, showing comprehension and interpretive skill.
- Writing section
- Examination Section 3: students produce original Tamil texts in specified forms and registers, assessed on content, organisation, vocabulary range and grammatical accuracy.
- Authentication
- The process of verifying that assessed work is the student's own, using draft records, teacher observation and signed declarations for out-of-class tasks.
- Performance descriptors
- Graded statements describing levels of achievement against each criterion, used to score SACs consistently and to show students what distinguishes higher from lower responses.
- Study score scaling
- School-assessed coursework grades are statistically moderated against external examination performance, so SAC ranking within the cohort affects the final study score.
- Examination criteria
- The published dimensions against which responses are judged, typically including relevance, depth of analysis, organisation, range and accuracy of Tamil, and appropriateness of register.
- Detailed study
- A student-negotiated topic within the prescribed content, researched and presented orally and in writing, demonstrating independent analysis in Tamil.