Early Tamil Epigraphy: From the Earliest Times to the Sixth Century A.D. c27.s33.1

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.