Tamil thesaurus for English words and phrases

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Udhaya, ..)

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Irony does not have any meaning to do with humor of the negative kind (vEdhanaiyAna nagaichchuvai). Sarcasm is closer to it.

Merriam-Webster's dictionary:
irony: [Gk. eiron: dissembler] the use of words to express the opposite of what one really means; incongruiyty between the actual result of a sequence of events and the expected result.

Given this muran or murnbAdu would be candidates;
But muran should be good enough. Because muran directly means contrast or incongruity.
The principle to follow is to use as concise a phrase or word as possible. MuranbAdu would be superfluous. I find people attempting to suggest long phrases taken from sample sentences that use the concept. This results in longer words or phrases than necessary. Also we, in these days of unsophisticated usage of Tamil, tend to forget or shy away from compact Tamil words that are actually able to accurately and elegantly convey the meaning of the target english word.


Stereotype: a metal printing plate cast from mold made from a set type; something agreeing with a pattern especially an idea that many people have about a thing or a group and that may often be untrue or partly true.

achchukkOrththArppOla is not a noun equivalent to the noun stereotype. achchu seems to be the equivalent of mold; achchukkOrppu equivalent of set type. casting is vArththal and cast is vArrppu like in "puthiyavArppugal"; then I wonder
if achchuvArppu or vArppu if one wanted to literally translate the first meaning. if one wanted to have an equivalent Tamil word matching only the second meanining one has more freedom.

nandri...
chandra.

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Chandrasekaran,
We are not deliberately shying away from a compact word, we are infact searching for it. The very reason behind this thread is to get more sophisticated with our Thamizh vocabulary.

I appreciate your in depth response for each word. I still don't feel that muran captures the full meaning of irony because irony is not just a contrast, it also stands for a poignant turn of events (If a writer didn't possess a pen, it would be an ironic circumstance; if a cigarette company owner died of lung cancer there is irony there). Either through usage or its vagueness, the word irony packs a lot of meaning that covers a range of moods and situations.

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Udhaya,

Thanks for your response. I would like to clarify that I was not saying that people *deliberately* shy away from compact words. I meant that people do it subconsciously or as a habit due to subconscious sociolinguistic habits, complexes and compulsions. I apologize if it sounded otherwise and you or anyone else.

Now to address using muran for irony, I had quoted the text of the meaning for that word from the abovementioned dictionary. To see whether poignant turn of events is covered by irony, I checked the dictionary again and am quoting the text for the text of the meaning for the word poignant:

poignant: adj:1. painfully affecting the feelings
2. deeply moving.

Now irony seems to hardly cover poigant turn of events. The focus of irony is still incongruity or contrast. And muran should be able to take care of "irony".

Of course, I would like to refer to an English-Tamil dictionary produced by an organization such as a university or research institute or some authority. I am sure they have done the research already. Does anyone know an abridged version of such a dictionary? I understand that there is the Tamil lexicon which is voluminous which is worth keepig in one's library anyway.

Nandri,
chandra

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I don't want to belabor the point but there are many forms of irony: dramatic, tragic, Socratic, etc. All of them can't be cloaked under one word such as muran. But I hope we can move onto other words and phrases. BTW, English-Tamil and Tamil-English dictionaries do exist. I have both and I will check there too, but some of the words they give are archaic or longwinded.

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here are some words that i have not been able to get a GOOD thamizh equivalent:
volatile
thesaurus
prototype

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Is Thesaurus diff from dictionary. If it is not then agarAthi?
[This word means something else in Trichy, JR?]

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Gokul: Dictionary gives the meaning of words. Theasarus gives the equivalent words. ( very useful when solving crosswords).

Dictionary is agarAthi.

Does the concept of theasarus there in our language?

sorkalanjiam - na encyclopaedia va ?

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nigaNdu.

There exist a few classic nigaNdu's in Tamil
some of which are pingalam and thivAgaram.

chandra