Scholarly Work
At first when he moved to Illikunnu near Thalassery, he was interested in spreading the Gospel among others. During this period 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 Tuniberg University, Germany and were collected and compiled by the scholar Dr Skaria 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 held in high regard to this day among linguistic experts in Kerala for the high scholastic aptitude exhibited in his work. His dictionary has been described as "monumental" in a review of the work on Dravidian languages.
Read more about this topic: Hermann Gundert
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