of Malayalam being a 'daughter' of Tamil is misplaced. This is based on the fact that Malayalam and several Dravidian languages on the Western Coast have common archaic features which are not found even in the oldest historical forms of literary Tamil. Despite this Malayalam shares many common innovations with Tamil that emerged during the early Middle Tamil period, thus making independent descent impossible. For example, Old Tamil lacks the first and second person plural pronouns with the ending . It is in the Early Middle Tamil stage that first appears: Indeed, most features of Malayalam morphology are derivable from a form of speech corresponding to early Middle Tamil. Robert Caldwell, in his 1856 book "A Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian or South-Indian Family of Languages", opined that literary Malayalam branched from Classical Tamil and over time gained a large amount of Sanskrit vocabulary and lost the personal terminations of verbs. As the language of scholarship and administration, Old-Tamil, which was written in Tamil-Brahmi and the Vatteluttu alphabet later, greatly influenced the early development of Malayalam as a literary language. The Malayalam script began to diverge from the Vatteluttu and the Western Grantha scripts in the 8th and 9th centuries of Common Era. And by the end of the 13th century a written form of the language emerged which was unique from the Vatteluttu script that was used to write Tamil on the eastern coast. Old Malayalam Old Malayalam (Pazhaya Malayalam), an inscriptional language found in Kerala from c. 9th to c. 13th century CE, is the earliest attested form of Malayalam. The beginning of the development of Old Malayalam from a western coastal dialect of contemporary Tamil (Karintamil) can be dated to c. 7th - 8th century CE. It remained a west coast dialect until c. 9th century CE or a little later. The origin of Malayalam calendar dates back to year 825 CE. The formation of the language is mainly attributed to geographical separation of Kerala from the Tamil country and the influence of immigrant Tulu-Canarese Brahmins in Kerala (who also knew Sanskrit and Prakrit). It is generally agreed that the western coastal dialect of Tamil began to separate, diverge, and grow as a distinct language, mainly due to the heavy influence of Sanskrit and Prakrit, those became common prominent languages on Malabar Coast, when the caste system became strong in Kerala under Nambudiri Brahmins. The Old Malayalam