Eelam

This article is about the Tamil name for Sri Lanka. For the ideological state, see Tamil Eelam.
"Īḻam" redirects here. For other uses, see Ilam (disambiguation).
Location of Eelam, the Tamil name for Sri Lanka
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Eelam (Tamil: ஈழம், īḻam, Tamil: [iːɻɐm], also spelled Eezham, Ilam or Izham in English) is the native Tamil name for the South Asian island now known as Sri Lanka. Eelam is also the Tamil name for the spurge (a plant), toddy (an intoxicant) and gold.[1]

The exact etymology and the original meaning of the word are not clearly known, and there are number of conflicting theories. The retroflex approximant ḻ in īḻam is a characteristic phoneme for Dravidian languages that is now retained only in the closely related languages Tamil and Malayalam. Conventionally, it has been represented in the Latin script by the digraph zh.[2]

  1. ^ University of Madras (1924–1936). "Tamil lexicon". Madras: University of Madras. Archived from the original on 12 December 2012. {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help) (Online edition at the University of Chicago)
  2. ^ Cite error: The named reference Schalk was invoked but never defined (see the help page).