Early Tamil Epigraphy: From the Earliest Times to the Sixth Century A.D. c26.s22.t8.3

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".