Sunday, December 20, 2009

Chat notes: "How do you say...?" and Intro to Sentence Frames

One of the things I have been trying to get for some time is a simple sentence starter for "How do you say _______ in Tamil" with the whole sentence in Tamil. With the help of a girl in Sri Lanka, I think we have it!
(This is conversational Tamil. I'll have to work on how to make it proper written Tamil next.)

For the sentence: "How do you say ________ in English?"
we say: "aangilathil ______ epadi solvinga?"

For the sentence: "How do you say ________ in Tamil?" 
we say: "thamilile ______ epadi solvinga?"
The ending "ile" = in


"Solvinga" looks like it is in future tense, which makes sense actually since I remember reading in Asher's Colloquial Tamil book that future tense is used for what people regularly do. So this is more like, "How do people normally say...."

I am hoping to create a collection of Tamil sentence starters/frames somewhat like what has been done for English Language Arts classrooms as in this example [pdf] (These are printable posters). This article [pdf] has a more detailed description of how to use sentence starters and frames in a classroom.

I found these examples on an elementary school website somewhere:
What can you do?   I can ___________.
What do you have?  I have __________.
What do you like to play?  I play __________.

 If anyone wants to help me make some Tamil sentence frames, let me know and let's get started!

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