Is tamil derived from Sanskrit

[A P MASILAMANI]

There is no cause for concern when the same word or connected word is found in Indo-European. People of IE were in contact with Archaic Tamil in West Asia before IEs dispersed eastwards and westwards.

Take the word vithavai, which we said may be Indo-European in origin.

In Greek, it was in the form "eitheos" and it did not denote a lady who has lost her husband, but a man who had given up ( or postponed) his marriage. Sanskrit borrowed from Greek and used the word to refer to a widow (female). All other IE languages followed Skrt. Latin widuus meant a widow.

The root word for Greek was Tamil vidu = give up (give up or postpone marriage in this instance.). Do you see the connection now?

Hence, in archaic or proto Tamil, there should have been a word viduvai (vidu + vai (suffix) ) , meaning a person who gave up marriage and this must have been borrowed by Greek. We lost the complete word viduvai but we still have the root word : vidu, quite fortunately.

Greek borrowed vidu but had its own suffix (os) added to it. (Compare: Christ > Christos).

LATIN also used its own suffix ( vidu-us) us suffix just like Julius.

But Skrt retained the Tamil suffix vai: Skrt form is "vithava" vai> va.

.Quite clear that we lost the word viduvai but still have the root of all these words shown above.

How fortunate!! We still have the raw material but lost the finished product and have borrowed a replica or:

viduvai (T) corrupted to vithava in Tamil itself i and the original thereafter was lost. Either way it did not make a difference.