The use of polysemy for word‐play in ancient Tamil literature and the traditional tools available for dealing with it.

Jean-Luc Chevillard (1)

1 HTL - HTL - Histoire des Théories Linguistiques - UMR 7597

This presentation will serve a double purpose. On the one hand, I shall present excerpts from ancient Tamil literature, illustrating the use of polysemy (and homophony), in combination with "dignified puns" 1 in a poem which came to be called Tiruviyamaka "sacred yamaka" by posterity, after the name of an ornamental figure (aṇi) which that poem seems (perhaps anachronistically) to illustrate, that figure belonging to a type called yamaka (in Sanskrit) or maṭakku (in Tamil) by later theoreticians. On the other hand, I shall briefly discuss some lexical tools created in the course of the twin histories of Tamil "classical"2 literature(s) and Tamil śāstric literature(s), and transmitted up to the present time by many successive generations of teachers and students, the transmission process itself being probably responsible for the progressive growth and multiplication of those tools, often referred to as kōśa‐s "thesauri", the two most ancient Tamil kōśa‐s being the Tivākaram and the Piṅkalam, which certainly played an important role in codifying and mapping literary Tamil.

Mots clés: Tamil; Polysemy; Poetics

Mots clés: Tamoul; polysémie; poétique

Domaines: Linguistique

Jean-Luc Chevillard. The use of polysemy for word‐play in ancient Tamil literature and the traditional tools available for dealing with it.. Sens multiple(s) et polysémie : perspectives croisées, Orient & Occident, Jun 2013, Aix en Provence, France. ⟨halshs-00933495⟩