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The eras are wildly divergent. Middle Tamil says it "Develops into Modern Tamil by the 16th century and Old Malayalam by the 9th century". But Old Malayalam says "Old Malayalam is the period of the Malayalam language spanning the 1st century BC to the 4th century AD (100 BCE - 325 CE)". — SMcCandlish☏¢ 😼 23:35, 20 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]
@SMcCandlish: This article represents AFAICS tha mainstream view about the emergence of Malayalam. Old Malayalam is a POV-fork created by an editor who subscribes to the popular primordalist fringe theory that Malayalam is a very ancient spilt from Proto-Dravidian (cf. the back-and-forth editing in Malayalam). I haven't been really aware of the fork Old Malayalam, but only of Karintamil, which now looks good but started out very weird[1] (note the date "3100 BC"!). –Austronesier (talk) 07:58, 21 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Glad to know someone understands how this contradiction/forking happened. Anyway, we clearly need an article (even if a stub) on Old Malayalam, but without contradicting other articles, and with sources on and WP:DUE description of the (real-world) disputes about it. I would assume if people have been arguing on-site a long time about this that various of them have put up sources at least on talk pages. — SMcCandlish☏¢ 😼 08:51, 21 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]
I was just looking at this article and discovered that many of the references were incomplete: they used Harv. but the citations were not present. I guessed that the article had been split from Tamil language, and have copied all the relevant references to here. However, there is one note with no reference attached in either article: Macdonell 1994. If anybody could add this reference, that would be helpful to readers (I know approximately nothing about Middle Tamil. A search has turned up some books by Arthur Anthony Macdonell, but he seems to have been a Sanskritist, so I've seen no evidence that he also published on Tamil.) --ColinFine (talk) 00:07, 15 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
