Early Tamil Epigraphy: From the Earliest Times to the Sixth Century A.D. c26.s22.t1: 6.22.1 Caldwell's Law
Early Tamil Epigraphy: From the Earliest Times to the Sixth Century A.D. c26.s22.t1
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6.22.1 Caldwell's Law
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Caldwell's celebrated 'law of convertibility of surds and sonants' states that the stops are always pronounced as surds in initial position and when doubled, and as sonants in medial (intervocalic and postnasal) positions.¹ The law was formulated by him on the basis of modern Tamil pronunciation. The question whether this law held good in earlier times has long been debated.² There is no direct evidence as the Tamil script does not distinguish between voiced and voiceless consonants. Attempts have been made to settle the question on the basis of Tamil loanwords in Indo-Aryan and Western classical languages and also in Kannada and Telugu literary works and inscriptions, as the scripts of these languages could have faithfully recorded voicing in the loanwords.³ The problem has also been studied more rigorously utilising the comparative method of Dravidian phonology.⁴ As far as Old Tamil is concerned, there is at present a consensus among Dravidian linguists that stops had weakened or lenis articulation leading to voicing in medial positions.
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¹ Robert Caldwell 1856 (3rd edn. 1961 reprint): pp. 138-139.
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² The literature on this question is extensive. See especially T. Burrow 1968a: pp. 1-17; Bh. Krishnamurti 1961: pp. 28-33; K. Zvelebil 1970: pp. 78- 84; P. S. Subrahmanyam 1983: pp. 269-286 for discussion and earlier references.
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³ E.g., for evidence from a 12th or 13th century literary work, see Bh. Krishnamurti 1971: pp. 356-361; for inscriptional evidence of Tamil loanwords in Kannada, Grantha and Nāgarī scripts, see K. G. Krishnan 1981b: pp. 77-86.
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⁴ See references in n. 2 above.
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The discovery of Tamil-Brāhmī inscriptions has brought to light new evidence in the form of a sizeable vocabulary of Old Tamil interspersed with loanwords from Prakrit in a script derived from Brāhmī which has a complete set of voiced consonants. The significance of this new development for re-examining the problem of voicing of consonants in Old Tamil has been recognised;¹ but no in-depth study could be undertaken earlier for want of reliable texts. The evidence presently available may be summarised as follows.
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¹ E.g., K. Zvelebil 1970: p. 79, n. 3. P. S. Subrahmanyam 1983: p. 279.