Early Tamil Epigraphy: From the Earliest Times to the Sixth Century A.D. c26.s19.1

c26.s19.1

One of the remarkable orthographic features of the Early Tamil-Brāhmī inscriptions is the occasional pause or break between a consonant and the following vowel in the *same* syllable. This does not appear to be alphabetic writing with separation of consonants from the following vowels.² This orthographic feature does not occur in the Late Period and is not also attested in Tamil literary or epigraphical sources. The pause is noticed only in three words (two of them with two variants each) in the Corpus. An empirical study of the words reveals that the pause serves two functions.