Everything you have learned in this course has a history, and the history explains the grammar. Malayalam is Dravidian, a family unrelated to Sanskrit and Hindi, so a Hindi speaker and a Malayalam speaker stand further apart than English and Hindi. You learn how Malayalam slowly split from Tamil between roughly the ninth and fourteenth centuries, cut off by the Western Ghats and reshaped by heavy Sanskrit borrowing. Then comes മണിപ്രവാളം, the ruby-and-coral style, and its exact parallel in English after 1066: house and residence, വീട് and ഗൃഹം. Words and phrases in this class: മലയാളം (malayaalam) – Malayalam ഭാഷ (bhaasha) – language പശ്ചിമഘട്ടം (pashchimaghattam) – the Western Ghats മണിപ്രവാളം (manipravaalam) – ruby and coral (the Malayalam-Sanskrit style) വീട് (veedu) – house (everyday) ഗൃഹം (gruham) – house (Sanskrit, elevated) തീ (thee) – fire (everyday) അഗ്നി (agni) – fire (Sanskrit, elevated) വെള്ളം (vellam) – water (everyday) ജലം (jalam) – water (Sanskrit, elevated) വട്ടെഴുത്ത് (vattezhuthu) – Vattezhuthu, the old round script In this class: • Dravidian, not Indo-European: why Hindi and Malayalam are further apart than you think • The slow split from Tamil, and the mountain wall that drove it • Heavy Sanskrit borrowing, and the ruby-and-coral style • Everyday and elevated word pairs, like English house and residence Quizzes below. Dr. Reshmi R Nair — SpeakMalayalam.