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Early Tamil Epigraphy: From the Earliest Times to the Sixth Century A.D. c22.s1: 3.1 Language of cave inscriptions

Early Tamil Epigraphy: From the Earliest Times to the Sixth Century A.D. c22.s1

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3.1 Language of cave inscriptions

3.1.1 The unsolved problem

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The pioneering studies, especially by Subrahmanya Aiyer on the language of the cave inscriptions, have established that the language is basically Tamil although with an admixture of Prakrit. However, Subrahmanya Aiyer's own readings led to another controversy: How much of Tamil is present in the inscriptions and what kind of Tamil? In the words of Kamil Zvelebil:

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How is it possible that there is such a vast difference between this kind of Tamil employed in these records, and the more or less contemporary or/and only slightly later literary Tamil language (*centamiḻ*) of *Tolkāppiyam* and the Sangam classics? This was a problem left unsolved by K.V.S. Ayyar.¹

3.1.2 How much Tamil?

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Before we look at the problem of the quality of the language of the cave inscriptions, it will be instructive to examine quantitatively the presence of Tamil and Prakrit in it.

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To the meagre number of four or five Tamil words already recognised by Krishna Sastri, Subrahmanya Aiyer could add only a dozen more—surprisingly few, considering the major paradigm shift effected by his own study (Table 3.¹).

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Tamil words in the cave inscriptions as read by -

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Krishna Sastri (1919):²

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² H. Krishna Sastri 1919:p. 346.

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| -*uṭai* #, *ūr*, *ēri*, *kuṭu-* / *koṭu-*, *nāṭu* | 5 |

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\# Incorrectly read.

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Subrahmanya Aiyer (1924):³

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³ K. V. Subrahmanya Aiyer 1924:pp. 287-299.

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| *itā*, *iva*, *iḷa-* *uṟai*, *kunṟa-* *ceytā(ṉ)*, *tantai*, | |
| *neṭu-*, *pāḷi*, *piṟantā(ṉ)*, *makaṉ*, *vēṇ* | 12 |

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List of additional words only.

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| Total | 17 |

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Table 3.¹. Earliest readings of Tamil words in cave inscriptions (up to 1924).

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¹ Kamil Zvelebil 1966:pp. 18-19.

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Kamil Zvelebil compiled a glossary of simple stems occurring in the inscriptions as read by him and computed the relative frequency of Dravidian and Indo-Aryan as follows:¹

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¹ Kamil Zvelebil 1966: p. 41; see also Index Verborum at pp. 36-41.

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| Language | Stems |
| Dravidian | 43 |
| Indo-Aryan | 47 |
| Unknown | 33 |
| Total | †123 |

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(† Including 6 Dr. and 6 IA additional stems from the later Sittannavasal II inscriptions, which, however, do not materially alter the picture.)

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Zvelebil reached the following conclusion on the basis of the statistical data compiled by him:

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The ratio of 47: 43 for IA: Dr. entitles us fully to characterize the language of the records under scrutiny as a hybridized form of language. The grammar of the inscriptions is, however, fully Tamil . . . This, as well as the distribution of lexical items, shows that the language of the records has rightly been characterized as hybrid Tamil. ²

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² Ibid. p. 42.

3.1.3 What kind of Tamil?

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It is, therefore, hardly surprising that even while scholars hailed Subrahmanya Aiyer's effort, his readings were treated with reserve.³ The 'defective' orthography, as it was perceived at the time, drew responses in opposite directions as illustrated by the following quotations:

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³ "They (cave inscriptions) are yet to be satisfactorily read and interpreted." T.N. Subramanian 1957: pp. 1506-1507. The scepticism, even if it is somewhat less at present, still persists; e.g., "They (cave inscriptions) are too short, fragmentary, and not yet quite completely intelligible. . . " Kamil Zvelebil 1990: p. 51.

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Accepting, in the absence of a more satisfactory explanation, that these Brāhmī documents represent oldest specimens of the Tamil language that we have, we find that the orthography was halting and defective, suggesting that the Tamil language during the 3rd century B.C. was being reduced to writing for the first time.⁴

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⁴ Sunitikumar Chatterji 1956: pp. 149-150.

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The legitimate inference seems to be that these votive inscriptions are in a hybrid language containing Tamil as well as Prākṛit words . . . the strange jumble of words belonging to two different languages . . . It is of supreme importance, therefore, to remember that these epigraphs are not of great value to the study of linguistic development.⁵

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⁵ K.K. Pillay 1956: pp. 178-179.

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In a short chapter on the language of the cave inscriptions in his book *A History of Tamil Language*, Meenakshisundaran carried out a brief linguistic analysis of the published readings. According to him:

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The language is something like Tamil or the Proto-South Dravidian. But it must be noted that these inscriptions are in a hybrid language containing Tamil as well as Prakrit words because the Buddhists, who were great scholars in Prakrit and not themselves native speakers of Tamil, had these inscriptions cut in the rocks so as to be understood by the people of the region.¹

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¹ T.P. Meenakshisundaran 1965: pp. 41-42.

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Even though Mahalingam made an independent study of the cave inscriptions,² his conclusions were not materially different from those of other scholars of the period:

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The basically Tamil language used in these inscriptions was different from the Tamil language used in the Sangam literary works and contains good proportion of Prākṛit words. Probably the view that the language employed in many of these lithic records "is Tamil in its formative stages" may not be quite easy of acceptance though it betrays much unsteadiness in its grammatical and other features showing that "it was less homogeneous and regular in its characteristics". Its difference from the literary Tamil from the point of style was obviously due to the fact that "those who have been responsible for the records in question were obviously Buddhist and/or Jaina (and Ājīvika? - T.V.M) monks using a hybrid jargon with great admiration for Pāli and/or Prakrit" ... The language of these inscriptions is that of these religious teachers and their followers in the Tamil country.³

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³ Ibid. p. 157. The first citation "Tamil in its formative stages" is from K.A. Nilakanta Sastri, *History of South India*, 3rd edition 1966: p. 87. The other citations in this quotation are from Kamil Zvelebil 1966: pp. 48-50.

3.1.4 The language of the inscription is Old Tamil

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Recent advances in our knowledge of the language of the cave inscriptions summarised in Chapter 2 have rendered the earlier views based on unsatisfactory readings obsolete. The argument of the present study is that starting from accurately copied texts,⁴ and applying the orthographic rules which can be empirically formulated for reading the texts,⁵ it can be demonstrated that the language of the cave inscriptions, despite the presence of Prakrit loanwords, is Old Tamil, not materially different from the language of later Tamil inscriptions or even literary texts, in its basic phonological, morphological and syntactical features.⁶

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⁴ See section 2.15 on the procedures followed to procure accurate copies of the cave inscriptions.

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⁵ See Chapter 6 (Orthography).

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⁶ See Chapter 7 (Grammar).

3.1.5 Dravidian and Indo-Aryan in the inscriptions: the true proportion

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The extent of change in our understanding of the language of the cave inscriptions may be quantified (Table 3.²) on the basis of the data compiled from the revised and enlarged Corpus included in this volume.

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² T.V. Mahalingam 1967: pp. 201-298.

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The Corpus comprises 110 inscriptions, 89 in Tamil-Brāhmī and 21 in Early Vaṭṭeḻuttu. There are 371 simple stems in the Corpus; 256 stems are Dravidian, 101 stems are Indo-Aryan, and the remaining 14 are of doubtful etymology.⁷ Taking the Tamil-Brāhmī inscriptions (Nos. *1-89*) alone into account, there are 307 stems out of which 213 stems are Dravidian, 81 stems are Indo-Aryan, and the remaining 13 are of doubtful etymology. In brief, the proportion of Dravidian: Indo-Aryan in the Tamil-Brāhmī inscriptions has increased dramatically from less than 1:1 as computed by Zvelebil in 1964 to more than 2.5:1 at present; only about one-fourth (in numbers as well as frequency) of the simple stems in the Tamil-Brāhmī inscriptions in the Corpus are of Indo-Aryan origin. It is significant that the proportion remains about the same even when the Early Vaṭṭeḻuttu inscriptions in the Corpus are included. These findings disprove the earlier view that the language of the cave inscriptions is a 'hybrid jargon' dominated by Indo-Aryan.

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⁷ See Etymological Indexes (Appendices IV to VI) for complete word lists.

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| Stems in the Corpus | Dravidian (Appendix IV) No. | Dravidian (Appendix IV) % | Indo-Aryan (Appendix V) No. | Indo-Aryan (Appendix V) % | Doubtful Etymology (Appendix VI) No. | Doubtful Etymology (Appendix VI) % | Total No. | Total % |
| In Tamil-Brāhmī Inscriptions (*1-89*): | | | | | | | | |
| Stems | 213 | 69.38 | 81 | 26.38 | 13 | 4.24 | 307 | 100.00 |
| Frequency | 339 | 71.67 | 118 | 24.95 | 16 | 3.38 | 473 | 100.00 |
| In Early Vaṭṭeḻuttu Inscriptions (*101-121*): | | | | | | | | |
| Stems | 43 | 67.19 | 20 | 31.25 | 1 | 1.56 | 64 | 100.00 |
| Frequency | 61 | 71.16 | 22 | 25.88 | 2 | 2.36 | 85 | 100.00 |
| Total for the Corpus: | | | | | | | | |
| Stems | 256 | 69.00 | 101 | 27.23 | 14 | 3.77 | 371 | 100.00 |
| Frequency | 400 | 71.68 | 140 | 25.09 | 18 | 3.23 | 558 | 100.00 |

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Table 3.2. Relative frequency of Dravidian and Indo-Aryan stems in the Corpus.

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Dry statistics do not, however, tell the whole story. To convey the 'feel' of the language of the Tamil-Brāhmī inscriptions, a rapid overview of their main lexical and grammatical features, dealing with the Dravidian and Indo-Aryan elements separately, is given below. Detailed documentation has been avoided in this summary as the topics are dealt with more fully in Chapter 7 (Grammar) and in the Commentary on the inscriptions. See also Inscriptional Glossary (Appendix I) and word-lists (Appendices II-VI).

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