Tolkappiyam is the earliest extant Tamil grammatical treatise in verse which, in three parts, deals with the letter, the word, and the subject matter of poetry. As it takes into consideration all aspects of a human language including phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, prosody, rhetoric, and poetics, it has been praised by knowledgeable Western linguistics for its wide range, its theoretical and methodological richness and its depth. Tolkappiyar is now hailed as ‘the ultimate linguistic guru.’