Early Tamil Epigraphy: From the Earliest Times to the Sixth Century A.D. c22.s1.t3: 3.1.3 What kind of Tamil?
Early Tamil Epigraphy: From the Earliest Times to the Sixth Century A.D. c22.s1.t3
- Language
- English
3.1.3 What kind of Tamil?
c22.s1.t3.1
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:
c22.s1.t3.2
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.
c22.s1.t3.3
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
c22.s1.t3.4
⁴ Sunitikumar Chatterji 1956: pp. 149-150.
c22.s1.t3.5
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
c22.s1.t3.6
⁵ K.K. Pillay 1956: pp. 178-179.
c22.s1.t3.7
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:
c22.s1.t3.8
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
c22.s1.t3.9
¹ T.P. Meenakshisundaran 1965: pp. 41-42.
c22.s1.t3.10
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:
c22.s1.t3.11
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
c22.s1.t3.12
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.