Early Tamil Epigraphy: From the Earliest Times to the Sixth Century A.D. c21.s4.t2.16
Early Tamil Epigraphy: From the Earliest Times to the Sixth Century A.D. c21.s4.t2.16
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c21.s4.t2.16
***ṉ***: The most frequent letter in the Tamil cave inscriptions resembles an inverted J. It does not occur in the Brāhmī script, but looks somewhat like the *nā* of the Bhattiprolu script, which misled Krishna Sastri to identify it as *nā* of the "Bhattiprolu type".¹ Subrahmanya Aiyer took a different line and was successful in identifying the letter as the alveolar nasal *n* in Tamil. It is instructive to follow his line of reasoning summarised below.²