Elements of South-Indian Palæography, from the Fourth to the Seventeenth Century A.D. c10.s1.22

c10.s1.22

double values (viz., as surds and sonants) is unaccountable except that they had to deal with a language already reduced to writing. Tamiḷ words, however, appear to have puzzled northern and Singalese authors, and they evidently were aware that the Tamiḷ and Sanskrit or Pāli t did not mark the same sounds. Thus the Pāli has Damila; the Sanskrit Dramila, just as Ziegenbalg in his Tamiḷ Grammar (1716) calls the language “Lingua Damulica,” though Baldæus (1672) being a Dutchman has T[^1). To show how the Dravidian sounds differ from the Sanskrit sounds indicated by the same letters would take too much space to be admissible here, and would need the use of special type. Since Mr. Melville Bell’s “Visible Speech” has been published, and the Prātiçākhyas have been edited by Profr. Whitney and others, (to which may be added the use of the phonograph), an enquiry of this kind need not present any special difficulties. At the present stage of philological research in S. India it is indispensable.