Indian Epigraphy: A Guide to the Study of Inscriptions in Sanskrit, Prakrit, and the Other Indo-Aryan Languages c7.s2.t6.22

c7.s2.t6.22

The subsequent historical development of the modified southern system, however, is not at all what one would have anticipated by comparison with the usual patterns of evolution of scripts. Surprisingly, the capability of the Bhaṭṭiprōḷu and Tamil Brāhmī scripts to write vowelless consonants in a simple manner and thus to obviate the need for consonantal conjuncts does not seem to have been continued in the later forms of the southern scripts. Indeed, as shown by Mahadevan (op. cit., 82–3), this innovative system actually is attenuated in some (perhaps later)¹⁰⁶ Tamil Brāhmī inscriptions, in which the unmarked consonant may represent either the pure consonant *or* the consonant plus *a*, and in still later inscriptions the system of vowelless consonants falls out of use entirely. Mahadevan attributes the failure of this tentative experiment toward alphabetization to the influence of the scripts of adjoining regions of India and Sri Lanka, which retained the standard Indic modified syllabic system;