Early Tamil Epigraphy: From the Earliest Times to the Sixth Century A.D. c26.s22.t10: 6.22.10 Conclusion
Early Tamil Epigraphy: From the Earliest Times to the Sixth Century A.D. c26.s22.t10
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6.22.10 Conclusion
c26.s22.t10.1
On the basis of the direct and unambiguous evidence from the Tamil-Brāhmī inscriptions taken together with the native grammatical tradition, the present study favours the interpretation summarised at (A) above, viz., there was no voicing of consonants in Old Tamil.¹ There was a slight drift towards lenis articulation and spirantisation of consonants in medial position; but the articulation in these cases was perceived to be quite different from the full-fledged voicing in Indo-Aryan, which explains why the Brāhmī characters for voiced consonants were not borrowed into the Tamil-Brāhmī script. By the time voicing of consonants developed as a secondary characteristic in Tamil in the early medieval period as a result of contacts with Indo-Aryan as well as the Kannada and Telugu languages, the Tamil script had acquired fixity and resisted inclusion of additional characters in its graphemic inventory. The problem of representing voiced consonants in the loanwords from the Indo-Aryan was solved by utilising Grantha characters for this purpose. Even thereafter, Literary Tamil avoided employing Grantha characters to indicate voicing of consonants in medial position. This avoidance is also seen in Malayalam orthography for native words² even though the script is derived from Grantha and has a full complement of characters for voiced consonants.
c26.s22.t10.2
¹ It is relevant in this context to refer to the dual system followed for romanised transliteration of Tamil. The *Tamil Lexicon* and linguistic publications strictly follow the phonemic method, using only one set of stops ( *k*, *c*, *ṭ*, *t* and *p*). The official epigraphical publications follow the phonetic method indicating voicing in medial position with the use of voiced stops (*g*, *j*, *ḍ*, *d* and *b*) imposing modern Tamil pronunciation on ancient inscriptional language. The transliteration is, however, not always quite consistent. In practice, the official epigraphical publications follow the phonemic transcription for the Tamil-Brāhmī inscriptions, but switch over to the phonetic transcription for the later inscriptions in Vaṭṭeḻuttu and Tamil scripts.
c26.s22.t10.3
² Cf. Malayalam entries in *DEDR*. E.g., *akam* 'inside' (D. 7), *ampu* 'arrow' (D. 178), etc.