Early Tamil Epigraphy: From the Earliest Times to the Sixth Century A.D. c26.s17.1

c26.s17.1

One of the characteristic orthographic features of the Tamil-Brāhmī inscriptions is the employment of a single consonant in writing to represent the doubled consonants in the language. This feature is due to the influence of Prakrit inscriptional orthography which seldom permits doubled consonants in writing. However, unlike in Prakrit inscriptions, doubling of consonants is present as an optional feature in the Tamil-Brāhmī inscriptions from the earliest times.¹ The presence or absence of doubled consonants in any particular inscription is unpredictable. The same inscription or even the same word is found to employ or avoid doubled consonants at random. However, a survey of the inscriptions in the Corpus shows a clear trend towards increasing use of doubled consonants approximating to the linguistic norms. The main features of this development which may be interpreted as due to the waning influence of Prakrit inscriptional orthography and the growing influence of the local language, are summarised below.