Early Tamil Epigraphy: From the Earliest Times to the Sixth Century A.D. c25.s12.1

c25.s12.1

The most interesting palaeographic feature of Tamil-Brāhmī is the formation of four additional letters to represent the consonants *ḷ*, *ḻ*, *ṟ* and *ṉ* in Tamil. It will be seen that in each case the additional letter is formed by a process of simple adaptation from the corresponding Brāhmī letter with the nearest phonetic value (Chart 3). The mode of formation of the letters provides valuable insight into their early phonetic affinities. These four letters serve as 'markers' of Tamil-Brāhmī and their presence in Southern Brāhmī and Sinhala-Brāhmī inscriptions of known dates provides new evidence for crosschecking the dates of the Tamil-Brāhmī inscriptions. The story of the discovery of the special letters in the Tamil cave inscriptions has already been narrated.¹ In this section, we shall study their origin and palaeographic evolution.