Early Tamil Epigraphy: From the Earliest Times to the Sixth Century A.D. c26.s22.t8: 6.22.8 Interpreting the evidence
Early Tamil Epigraphy: From the Earliest Times to the Sixth Century A.D. c26.s22.t8
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6.22.8 Interpreting the evidence
c26.s22.t8.1
The evidence briefly summarised above has been interpreted in two diametrically opposite ways, one emphasising the negative evidence of the earliest Tamil-Brāhmī inscriptions and the native grammatical tradition, and the other stressing the objective results of the comparative method in Dravidian.
c26.s22.t8.2
(A) There was no voicing in Tamil when the Tamil-Brāhmī script was devised and *Tolkāppiyam* was written. Had voicing been present, the readily available and known characters for the voiced consonants in the Brāhmī script would have been borrowed. This evidence is reinforced by the virtual avoidance of voiced consonants even in the Prakrit loanwords occurring in Tamil-Brāhmī inscriptions, indicating the influence of Tamil phonology with its lack of voicing. Equally important is the negative evidence of *Tolkāppiyam* which devotes a whole chapter to articulatory phonetics (*Tol. Eḻu. Piṟappiyal*) which would have dealt with voicing if the feature was present in the language.¹
c26.s22.t8.3
¹ P.S. Subrahmanya Sastri 1934 (1997 reprint): pp. 49-57; his conclusion: "Therefore Dr. Caldwell's theory of convertibility of surds and sonants can hold good only with reference to the spoken Tamil of the present day." See also P. S. Subrahmanyam 1983: pp. 269-286. His view is: "on the whole, it will be better to conclude that at the earliest stage of Tamil (i.e., when the Tamil script was devised and *Tolkāppiyam* was written) plosives were pronounced voiceless in the medial position and later, i. e., perhaps at the beginning of our era, voiced or lax articulation of them in that position must have started." However, according to Suniti Kumar Chatterji (1956: pp. 164-165), voicing of stops existed in Ancient Tamil of the pre-Sangam and pre-*Tolkāppiyam* period, but voicing was totally lost in the period between the early centuries of the Christian Era, or even earlier still, and 600 A.D. "In oldest Tamil as in the Pallava inscriptions and as in the earliest Tamil of literature, the modern Tamil habit of pronunciation did not obtain. There were no voiced stops at all in the language; otherwise there would have been no need to frame a special alphabet and orthography for Tamil".
c26.s22.t8.4
(B) The comparative method points to the existence of lenis articulation and voicing in medial position in Dravidian even prior to the pre-Tamil stage. As these features are present in modern Dravidian languages including Tamil, they must have existed in Old Tamil also, but not provided for in its orthography.² This omission is explained by assuming that those who created the earliest script for Tamil must have been aware of the principle of the phoneme and saw no point in borrowing Brāhmī voiced consonants to indicate voicing of allophones in complementary distribution which is completely predictable.³ The consequent reduction achieved in the number of characters in the script was probably perceived as an advantage.
c26.s22.t8.5
² K. Zvelebil (1970: p. 80) puts forth this view most forcefully: "After careful re-examination of this problem it seems that we have no reason whatsoever to posit voiceless intervocalic stops for any stage of Dravidian" (emphasis in the original).
c26.s22.t8.6
³ Ibid. p. 82: "This situation (namely that intervocalic voiced stops are regular, phonologically conditioned, positional allophones of one series of stop-phonemes, in complementary distribution with voiceless initial stops) was obviously well understood by those who first devised or adapted the Tamil system of writing; they had a clear conception of the basic principles of the phoneme and its positional variants, and Tamil orthography is truly and fully phonemic in this respect."