Early Tamil Epigraphy: From the Earliest Times to the Sixth Century A.D. c27.s33: 7.30 Participial nouns

Early Tamil Epigraphy: From the Earliest Times to the Sixth Century A.D. c27.s33

Language: English

c27.s33.t1 7.30.1 PNG suffixes of participial nouns — 5 parts
c27.s33.t2 7.30.2 Past participial nouns — 5 parts
c27.s33.t3 7.30.3 Non-past participial noun — 1 part

7.30 Participial nouns

c27.s33.1

Participial nouns (*viṉaiyāl aṇaiyum peyar*) are formed by the successive additions of tense markers (past or non-past) and pronominal (PNG) suffixes to verb stems. A participial noun can function like a noun or a verb. It is a noun as it can be inflected for case, though such inflected forms do not occur in the Corpus; it is a verb as it has tense and can take the place of a finite verb in a sentence. However, *kāttāṉ* (58.2), formally a participial noun, 'he who protected' from *kā* 'to protect', occurs in the Corpus as a personal name.

c27.s33.2

A characteristic feature of the inscriptions in the Corpus is the employment of participial nouns as finite verbs. Such participial nouns have been translated as finite verbs in the Corpus. e.g.,

c27.s33.3

antuvaṉ koṭupitavaṉ (No. 53)
lit., 'Antuvaṉ who caused to be given'
translated as: 'Antuvaṉ caused to be given'.

7.30.1 PNG suffixes of participial nouns

c27.s33.t1.1

PNG suffixes are added to participial nouns to indicate person, number and gender as in the case of nouns and pronouns. The addition of PNG suffixes to the participial nouns in the Corpus is illustrated below.