A Core Vocabulary for Tamil

University of Pennsylvania, 1976. — 146 p.This vocabulary list is directed towards the Tamil instructor and the advanced student. Its primary goal is to bring some order to the teaching of vocabulary in the first two years of Tamil instruction. A secondary goal is to help the student through the vocabulary maze of Tamil diglossia. Three main criteria were employed in selecting words for the list: high frequency, usage, and semantic adequacy. The list is primarily in Modern Literary Tamil (MLT) and is glossed in both Colloquial Tamil (CT) and in English. High Literary Tamil (HLT) words have been entered in brackets after or under the main MLT entry as a third variant. As the normal script used for MLT is in many ways ambiguous for colloquial pronunciation, a system of diacritics has been added to make the pronunciation clear. Appendix 1 groups the words by semantics and usage and allows for access to the list through CT or English. Appendix II gives the few words which have a high frequency in LT but were not included in the main list because of a more common synonym.