Update After this post was published, some people asked for some other suffixes to be analyzed. I’ve now made an interactive webpage to analyse place names in any way with SQL: Open Playground Intro I noticed something unique when I walked around in Kakkanad, some of the local place names ended with the word “മുഗൾ”. I haven’t heard of any other place having this suffix in Kerala before, so it was quite interesting to me.... [READ MORE]

This is the story of solving a problem, making a dictionary book online. The dictionary Njattyela Sreedharan (ഞാറ്റ്യേല ശ്രീധരൻ) is an 85 year old person from Kannur, Kerala. Out of his interest for Dravidian languages, he spent 25 years in compiling a dictionary of four Dravidian languages - Malayalam, Kannada, Tamil, Telugu. The dictionary was originaly handwritten in a book of four columns. This was later published as a book by Senior Citizens Forum.... [READ MORE]

Some days ago, I came across Malayalam numerals and found it very interesting. Unlike Hindi or Kannada numerals, the numerical grammar of Malayalam was unique. It’s a direct fork of the Tamil numeric system. So, Tamil & Malayalam has this unique numeral system. It is no longer commonly used though. Like the rest of the world, we use Hindu-Arabic numeral system now. I had to include my phone number in a webpage recently for an event hosting and was concerned whether spammers would take hold of it with their fancy phone-number mining scripts.... [READ MORE]

This is certainly not an April Fool and doesn’t involve a rickroll. :P 😝 Introducing Indic-En, a browser extension to convert websites in Indian languages (Malayalam, Hindi, Kannada) to Manglish, Hinglish & Kanglish. This is the first WebExtension that I’ve made. This extension will be useful for people who can understand the language, but can’t read it (read the script). I’ve also made a similar Android app “Manglish” which does this, but only for the Malayalam language.... [READ MORE]

About Lately, I’ve been volunteering for Swathanthra Malayalam Project (SMC). I took up the initiative in revamping KDE localization which was dorminant for many years. More about how, why I started this is in this Twitter thread. We were successful in pushing new Malayalam localization to the wide range of KDE products. November 1 is the birthday of Kerala state of India. Kerala was formed on the basis of the language spoken, Malayalam.... [READ MORE]

Today, I’m introducing Varnam Editor, an easy software for you to write Malayalam and other Indian languages. It is easily installable for GNU/Linux distros like Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Debian, Archlinux etc. Technically, it’s an editor for transliterating Indian languages. Varnam Editor uses an existing library called Varnam and makes it easy to install & use. Transliteration From Wikipedia : Transliteration is a type of conversion of a text from one script to another that involves swapping letters (thus trans- + liter-) in predictable ways (such as α → a, д → d, χ → ch, ն → n or æ → ae).... [READ MORE]

I’m happy to announce a new Android app called “Manglish”, it’s an app to convert Malayalam text to Manglish. It’s a GNU GPL v3 licensed completely free software app with no ads thanks to the donors. Kept it as light as possible. You can download & install it in many ways : Play Store F-Droid APK (1.5MB) Updates 2021 May: Version 7 released with new On Screen Button feature. 2020 August: App has reached 5000 active installs.... [READ MORE]

I have an interesting story of how I learnt & used a curse word. Myru In Malayalam, a main curse word is “myru” which translates to “pubic hair”. In Tamil, it simply means “hair”. You can just go to a barber shop and say “annaa, cut my myru”, but in Malayalam this sentence is hilarious 🤣. When you refer the word to someone, it becomes “myre”. It’s like calling someone bro, but in the worst way possible :... [READ MORE]