Veeramamunivar’s Birthday
- Birth and Education: Born in 1680 in Castiglione delle Stivier, Italy.
- Constantine Joseph Peschi, popularly known as Veeramamunivar, was an Italian Jesuit priest, Tamil scholar and a prominent figure in South India in the 18th century.
- Visited Goa in 1700.
- He also diligently studied Sanskrit, Telugu and Tamil and became proficient in these languages, especially Tamil.
- His works: Thembavani(1726), Chaturkaradhi and other works testify to his proficiency in Tamil.
- Thembavani contains 3,615 virtuous verses and tells the story of Susaiyappar, the father of Jesus Christ.
- It is noteworthy that Thembhavani was staged very well by Tamil scholars at the Madurai Tamil Sangam.
- Later, in 1711, he visited Madurai.
- Veeramamunivar composed four grammar books for the Tamil language. They are Kodunthamizh Lakhanam (1728), Senthamizh Lakhanam (1730), Thonnul Vairavukol (1730) and Tilvukol. The first three were written in Latin. Of these, Babington’s English translation of Senthamizh Lakhanam with the Latin original was published in 1917 by Joseph Industrial Printing Press, Trichy.
- Language skills: He visited various centres in South India including Tirunelveli, Ramanathapuram, Thanjavur and Madurai to learn Tamil, Sanskrit and Telugu.
- Translations and works: He translated “Thirukkural” into Latin, he wrote Tamil grammars, dictionaries and prose works.
- He also translated various Tamil literary works into European languages. He wrote Tamil grammars, dictionaries and prose works
- Lexicography: Compiled the first Tamil-Latin dictionary and a comprehensive Chathurakarathi. It is a four-fold dictionary containing words, synonyms and types of words and rhymes.
- He died in 1742.
- In 2019, Dr. Dominic Raj translated and published the entire Thembavani into English.
- The Tamil Development Department celebrates Veeramamunivar’s birth anniversary on 8 November as Dictionary Day, a government festival every year, and is proud to present an award in his name to Tamil scholars.
C.V. Raman
- C.V. Raman was born on November 7, 1888 in Tiruchirappalli, Tamil Nadu.
- The first Asian to win the Nobel Prize in Physics and the first recipient of the Bharat Ratna, C.V. Raman is best known for his advanced theory of light scattering – the inelastic theory of scattering.
- This phenomenon is called the Raman effect or Raman scattering,
- Rayleigh had already established the phenomenon of light scattering and had also provided reasons for the blue colour of the sky.
- But his work was based on multi-wavelength light passing through atmospheric gases that scatter light of shorter wavelengths.
- C.V. Raman established an advanced theory of scattering.
