Early Tamil Epigraphy: From the Earliest Times to the Sixth Century A.D. c27.s2.1

c27.s2.1

Tamil has an alphabet of 30 letters (*Tol. Eḻu.* 1). All except *au* occur in the Corpus. However, the length of *e* and *o* is not indicated in the earlier inscriptions, and only sporadically in the later inscriptions. Three 'dependent' sounds (*cārpeḻuttu*), viz., the shortened *-i* and *-u* and the *āytam* (*ḵ*) are also enumerated (*Tol. Eḻu.* 2), out of which only the last has a graphic form. The *āytam* does not occur in the Corpus. The Brāhmī characters *dh* and *s* occur marginally in loanwords from Indo-Aryan. See Chapters 5 and 6 for the distinctive palaeographic and orthographic features respectively of the Tamil-Brāhmī script.