A Tamil blogger, who goes by the pen name ‘Neechalkaran,’ has created a free online tool that helps Tamil writers check their text for grammatical mistakes in ‘sandhi’ – which dictates how two Tamil words must combine.
The tool that can be accessed at http://dev.neechalkaran.com/naavi is quite popular among a cross-section of online Tamil writers. A Facebook page for the tool has received more than 900 likes in the past year.
S. Raja Raman, a 26-year-old I.T. employee, has been enthusiastically blogging in Tamil for the past two years. During the course of publishing several technical articles, he came up with the idea of combining his twin passions of programming and writing.
He wrote an algorithm which, he says, factors in over 50 grammatical rules relating to ‘sandhi’ from the Tholkappiyam and Nannool , the two definitive works that contain the rules for Tamil (Sandhi mistakes are quite common when one combines two words. Many writers are confused on how the words would combine.)
A Physics graduate from Yadava College in Madurai, Mr. Raja Raman says since he published the free online tool last year, it has registered at least 12,000 visits.
Writer Jeyamohan has also referred to the tool being useful on his blog, he adds.
Spelling and grammar checks are abundantly available on the Word processing software for English. However such tools are not available much for Indic languages.
Sengai Pothuvan, the 78-year-old veteran Tamil Wikipedia author and translator of the Tholkappiyam for Wikisource, has used S. Raja Raman’s tool and also recommends it for Tamil writers.
The enthusiastic youngster is now working on a free full-fledged Tamil spell checker tool ‘Vaani’. He has also created online versions of classic Tamil board games including ‘Aadu Puli Aaatam’ (the goat and tiger game).
