Early Tamil Epigraphy: From the Earliest Times to the Sixth Century A.D. c25.s6.t4: 5.6.4 Sinhala-Brāhmī
Early Tamil Epigraphy: From the Earliest Times to the Sixth Century A.D. c25.s6.t4
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5.6.4 Sinhala-Brāhmī
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Early Sinhala-Brāhmī has markedly close palaeographic similarities with Mauryan Brāhmī on the one hand, and with Tamil-Brāhmī on the other.¹ Late Sinhala-Brāhmī which is strongly influenced by the contemporary Southern Brāhmī script, most probably due to close contacts with the Buddhist establishments in Andhra, is too divergent from Tamil-Brāhmī of the same period for any useful comparison.²
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¹ A. Velu Pillai 1980: pp. 38-54; 1981: pp. I-111 to I-120.
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² S. Paranavitana (1970: p. xxii) notes the similarities between the script of the later cave inscriptions in Sri Lanka and that of Andhra, but attributes the changes to local development.
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Palaeographic comparison of the earliest forms of the common letters indicates that Sinhala-Brāhmī, like Tamil-Brāhmī, is directly derived from Mauryan Brāhmī before the end of the Mauryan Age.³ In the case of Sinhala-Brāhmī, the chronology is confirmed by the dating of a few royal inscriptions.⁴ Thus the close palaeographic similarities between the common letters of Early Sinhala-Brāhmī and Early Tamil-Brāhmī provide further confirmation for dating the commencement of the latter script also from about the same time (ca. 200 b.c.).
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³ Cf. palaeographic charts in S. Paranavitana 1970: Pl. facing p. xvi and in S. Karunaratne. 1984: Figs. 1-35.
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⁴ S. Paranavitana (1970:p. xvii) dates the earliest cave inscriptions in Sri Lanka from the last quarter of the 3rd century b.c. S. Karunaratne (1984:pp. 2-5) places the upper limit of the earliest dated inscriptions at the beginning of the 2nd century b.c. A.H. Dani (1963) has not, even in the revised Indian edition (1986), noticed these works. Dani's dating of the earliest cave inscriptions of Sri Lanka to 'about the beginning of the first century a.d.' (ibid. p. 219) is hardly justified; his dating does not explain wherefrom Sri Lanka could have obtained the Mauryan Brāhmī forms in the 1st century a.d. when they were no longer current.
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While Tamil-Brāhmī has been adapted to suit the requirements of the Tamil phonetic system, Sinhala-Brāhmī has been adapted to the phonology of Sinhala-Prakrit, which is markedly different from that of the Indian Prakrits. While Tamil-Brāhmī did away with voiced consonants, aspirates, sibilants, the *anusvāra* and the *visarga*, Early Sinhala-Brāhmī dropped long vowels, aspirates, the sibilants *śh* and *s*, the *anusvāra* and the *visarga*, as these sounds did not exist in the language of the early cave inscriptions. While Tamil-Brāhmī added four new letters viz., *l*, *l*, *r* and *n* by modifying the Brāhmī letters with the nearest phonetic values, Early Sinhala-Brāhmī utilised the Brāhmī letter *jh* (an aspirate not present in Early Sinhala-Prakrit) in the place of *j* to represent some allied sound for which no letter was available in Brāhmī.
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One of the most interesting aspects of Early Sinhala-Brāhmī is the complete absence of ligaturing of consonants. In this respect, Sinhala-Brāhmī is unique among the Prakrit-based variants of Brāhmī. The avoidance of ligaturing of consonants is facilitated in Early Sinhala-Brāhmī by the phonological processes of assimilation and epenthesis which are more thoroughgoing in this language than in Indian Prakrits, most probably due to the substratum influence of Tamil. This would explain how the two scripts, one for a Middle Indo-Aryan and the other for a Dravidian language, were able to avoid ligatures, a prominent feature in all other regional scripts.
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Other palaeographic features shared by the two scripts are the common forms of the letters **a**, *ī* (read as *i* in Early Sinhala-Brāhmī) *m* and *ḷ*.¹ It is noteworthy that all these forms are replaced in Late Sinhala-Brāhmī by the corresponding forms² derived from Southern Brāhmī. This development indicates that the earlier forms are more likely to be native to the Tamil-Brāhmī script in which they continued to exist and gradually evolved into the corresponding Vaṭṭeḻuttu forms.
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¹ Compare the forms in Palaeographic Chart 2 with the corresponding forms illustrated in S. Karunaratne 1984: Figs. 1, 2, 26 and 34.
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² S. Karunaratne, ibid.