of the Bible, Old Testament from Hebrew and New Testament from Greek. The archives of information he collected from Tellicherry are kept in the University of Tübingen and were collected and compiled by the scholar Dr. Scaria 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 highly regarded among linguistic experts and his dictionary has been described as "monumental" in a review of the work on Dravidian languages. Publications {| class="wikitable" !Year published !! Title !! Description |- | 1843 || Keralolpathi || Origin of Kerala, translation from Malayalam Keralolpathi. |- | 1845 || Pazhancholmala || String of Malayalam proverbs for Christian theological idioms. |- | 1851 || Malayala Bhasha Viyakaranam || Malayalam Grammar |- | 1860 || Paathamala || First textbook in Malayalam |- | 1868 || Kerala pazhama ||33 years of Malayali history, from Vasco da Gama's arrival in 1498 (an English translation has been published by T Madhava Menon in 2003) |- | 1868 || New Testament || Translation of the New Testament in Malayalam |- | 1870 || [https://archive.org/details/1870_School_Dictionary_English_And_Malayalam/ School Dictionary] || |- | 1872 || Malayalam-English Dictionary || |- | 1879 || Malayalarajyam || The land of Malayalam |- | 1847 June || Rajyasamacharam (News of the Kingdom) || Newspaper |- | 1847 October || Paschimodayam || "Rise of the West" or "Dawn of the West", a magazine |- | 1881 || Sankeerthanangal || "The Book of Psalms" translated by Gundert |} Other contributions He was the one who introduced the punctuation marks – full stop, comma, semicolon, colon, and question mark – into the Malayalam language. Malayalam-English Dictionary. He returned to Germany in 1859. There he took ten more years to complete the dictionary. (1872) A number of words in this dictionary are not in use these days. But this is a priceless treasure for those who study the development of Malayalam. Years in Germany Due to poor health Gundert had to leave India in 1859. In Calw, the Black Forest, he joined the Calw Publishing House and became its director