Hello all!
I'm so grateful as always to this wonderful community and treasure chest of language teachers!
I know Hindi/Urdu scripts and I can understand Tamil. I have been really interested in south Indian languages and would like to learn more about the similarities and differences among the main 4 Dravidian languages, namely Kannada, Tamil, Telugu, and Malayalam. Which one(s) are more closely related to the other?
Is there a reason for the Kannada and Telugu script looking so similar? It is hard to tell which is which! And same with Tamil and Malayalam.Is it fair to assume that the first two are more of a pair, sharing more vocabulary and common points, and the latter two, Tamil and Malayalam are also more of a pair with again, more similarities to each other? Are any common points reflected among these languages and how they are expressed today in modern culture and literature for example, in books, film, religion?
North Indian Languages : Hindi, Marathi Bengali etc originated from Sanskrit.
South Indian Languages: Telugu, Malayalam and Kannade originated from Tamil, When you see the history there were many times the whole south India was ruled by one kingdom but later they got divided and they formed their own culture and language, but it borrowed from Tamil and like Tamil some loan words were from Sanskrit. The olden Tamil, I am talking about how Tamil used to look like 1000s of years ago is completely different from the way it looks now, the same is for other languages like Kannada, Telugu and malayalam, The script has evolved a lot but the spoken version didnt had much change thats why all south indian languages looks similar, I cannot speak any south indian languages other than Tamil, But i can understand them very well and its the same for other south Indian speakers.Its because everything originated from the olden Tamil, 1000's of years ago.
