Tolkappiyam is the oldest extent work in Tamil. Though there are bitter fights among scholars about its date, it is commonly assigned to the pre-Christian era. It is a unique grammatical treatise dealing with the letter, the word and the subject matter of poetry in its three parts. In about 1600 stanzas (nurpa), it describes the Tamil alphabet, sounds, rhetoric, prosody and poetics. It is a comprehensive study of the whole of language from the most ordinary level to the most poetic. Its author is deservingly hailed as the linguistics ultimate guru by some competent Western Linguistics.