Early Tamil Epigraphy: From the Earliest Times to the Sixth Century A.D. c21.s3.t2: 2.3.2 Orthography:
Early Tamil Epigraphy: From the Earliest Times to the Sixth Century A.D. c21.s3.t2
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2.3.2 Orthography:
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Krishna Sastri was the first to compare the Tamil cave inscriptions with the Bhattiprolu casket inscriptions of Andhra.¹⁰ However, he did not correctly apply the rules of the Bhattiprolu orthography discovered earlier by Bühler.¹¹ He assumed that a character in the cave inscriptions, which resembled *nā* of the casket inscriptions, was of the "Bhattiprolu type".¹ This led him to the implausible conclusion that "the numerous words ending in *nā* in all the inscriptions may be taken to be the genitive plurals ending in *-nāṃ*",² resulting in a gross exaggeration of the "Prakrit element" in the cave inscriptions. Actually, the Bhattiprolu *nā* (or, more generally, the *-ā* medial sign of Bhattiprolu) never occurs in the Tamil-Brāhmī script. It was left to Subrahmanya Aiyer to correct the reading of *nā* to *ṉ* (the alveolar nasal which occurs only in the Tamil-Brāhmī script).³
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¹⁰ H. Krishna Sastri 1919: p. 347. See also section 5.6.3 on the Bhattiprolu casket inscriptions.
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¹¹ See section 6.6 for discussion on the orthography of the Bhattiprolu inscriptions.
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¹ H. Krishna Sastri 1919: p. 337, n.11 and p. 348.
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² H. Krishna Sastri 1919: p. 347.
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³ See section 2.4.2.
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Krishna Sastri was again the first to guess correctly (though rather intuitively from his knowledge of Tamil epigraphy) that at least some of the consonants in the cave inscriptions have to be treated as basic.⁴ Actually, this is one of the main features of the Bhattiprolu orthography and it applies almost without exception to all the unmarked consonants in the early cave inscriptions.
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⁴ H. Krishna Sastri 1919: p. 347.