Age of the Nandas and Mauryas c11.s38.43

c11.s38.43

While it is thus not possible to decide if these monuments are Jain or Buddhist or both in their origin, the study of the inscriptions made so far³ suggests that thought the script employed in them was Brāhmī of the southern variety, the language was Tamil still in its formative stages. The script was alphabetic, and already included signs for peculiarly Dravidian sounds like ṛ, ḷ, ḻ, and ṇ; other peculiarities are that vocalic consonants were represented by two symbols first the sign for the consonant and then the complete vowel signs—thus yu was written as y (a) u. These developments and other peculiarities, not detailed here, must have come as the result of a pretty long process of trial and error extending over several generations.