PG COURSE IN CLASSICAL MALAYALAM

PG COURSE IN

 CLASSICAL MALAYALAM

 Ezhuthachan Malayalam University is poised to take the classical Malayalam language to newer academic levels.“We intend to introduce a postgraduate programme in classical Malayalam,” said Vice-Chancellor K. Jayakumar.The course in classical Malayalam will be the first of its kind, he said.Addressing newspersons at a meet-the-press programme at the Press Club here on Wednesday, Mr. Jayakumar said that the university wanted to do much more than conducting academic programmes.“We have the responsibility to take up projects meant for the promotion of not only the language and literature, but culture and knowledge as well,” he said.

The university will initiate a project to form a Malayalam technical vocabulary. At present, most technical programmes are taught and studied in English.“Our intention is to prepare a vocabulary good enough for any technical subject in Malayalam,” Mr. Jayakumar said. The university will launch a publication wing to bring to light all Malayalam literary works. It will also launch an academic journal from April 1.The Vice-Chancellor said that the journal would be interdisciplinary with digital versions to be made available on the net.Another ambitious project Malayalam University intends to take up is the chronicling of the Malayalam literary history modelling the Oxford history of English literature.“We also would like to launch a project to translate the Malayalam works of our writers into several other foreign languages,” Mr. Jayakumar said.

A language computing project, a digital library, a digital archive, a Malayalam dictionary and an Ezhuthachan lexicon are some other projects the university plans to take up in the coming years.Mr. Jayakumar said that a cultural atlas of Malayalam would be formed by conducting a survey of the variety of spoken Malayalam.He said the documentation project planned by the university would include archiving the classes of well-known teachers and the conversations and speeches of well-known litterateurs.The university will celebrate the 200th birthday of Herman Gundert with a wide variety of programmes. A scion of Gundert from Germany will lead a lecture at the university on January 16. A seminar on Gundert will be held at Thalassery on February 7.The university will also launch an annual inter-university literary festival called ‘Sahiti’, he said.

Prof. John Kurakar