page_title: Hermann Gundert
section_title: Scholarly work
hierarchical_section_title: Hermann Gundert / Scholarly work
caption_attribution_description: English: Herman Gundert Statue at Thalassery (near Thalassery Stadium). Photo by Atul/Shijaz - www.shijaz.com
context_page_description: Rev. Dr. Hermann Gundert was a German missionary, scholar, and linguist, as well as the grandfather of German novelist and Nobel laureate Hermann Hesse. Gundert compiled a Malayalam grammar book, Malayalabhaasha Vyakaranam, in which he developed and constricted the grammar spoken by the Malayalis, nowadays; a Malayalam-English dictionary, and contributed to work on Bible translations into Malayalam. He worked primarily at Thalassery on the Malabar coast, in Kerala, India. Gundert also contributed to the fields of history, geography and astronomy.
context_section_description: During his stay in Illikunnu near Tellicherry (Thalassery), he published around thirteen books in Malayalam including a translation of the Bible, Old Testament from Hebrew and New Testament from Greek. The archives of information he collected from Tellicherry are kept in the University of Tübingen and were collected and compiled by the scholar Dr. Scaria Zacharia as Thalassery Rekhakal.
  In Kerala, he took a deep interest in the local culture and the Malayalam language, attempting a systematic grammar of the language. This was one of the prominent non-Sanskrit-based approaches to Indic grammar.  Gundert considered Malayalam to have diverged from Proto-Tamil–Malayalam, or Proto-Dravidian.  Apart from the early inscriptions found on copper and stone, Gundert traced Malayalam to the Rāma Charitam, a poem predating the Sanskrit alphabet.
  Gundert is highly regarded among linguistic experts and his dictionary has been described as "monumental" in a review of the work on Dravidian languages.
caption: Gundert's statue near Thalassery Stadium
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