Tamil aaytam[aaydam] identified as PDlaryngeal

[Bh. Krishnamurti]

I am giving below the abstract of a paper on Ancient Tamil aaytam which has
not been related to Common Dravidain Phonology untill now. I suggested that
it was a relic reflex a Proto-Dravidain laryngeal (a h-type of sound similar
to Sanskrit visarga)some 34 years ago and I find more and more evidence.
Only scholars with analytical knowledge of Old Tamil phonology can throw
light on this problem as well as Comparative Dravidian scholars. I would
wellcome suggestions:Abstract:

Proto-Dravidian Laryngeal *H Revisited
BH. KRISHNAMURTI
University of Hyderabad

 Old Tamil records of  the early Christian era (3rd century BC to 3rd
century AD) noted the occurrence of a phoneme called Áytam with some kind of
h-colouring in about a dozen lexical items. Tamil Lexicon transliterates it
as /k(bar underneath)/, transcribed here as h(subdot).  Its distributional
properties include the following: (a) h(subdot) generally occurs after a
short vowel, (b) it lengthens the preceding vowel compensatorily, (c) it
gets assimilated to the following voiceless  stop, (d) it is lost  before
most consonants, (e) it alternates with a semi-vowel *y or *w
pre-vocalically or inter-vocalically.  From a comparative study of
definitely attested cases like Old Tamil ahtu 'that one', ihtu, 'this one',
and pahtu/pattu 'ten' , h was traced to a PD laryngeal *H. By examining  a
number of cases in Dravidian with similar phonological behaviour, I have
shown that a PD laryngeal *H  would explain   several   lexical and
grammatical items with aberrant phonology better than heretofore. These
include: (a) the root for  '3' (*muH-); (b) irregular verbs like  caH-'die',
*taH- 'bring, give to 1st or 2nd person', *waH- 'come' (all with *H in
root-final position); (c) five verb roots involving *H in its interior
structure, viz. *aHn-'say', *tiHn- 'eat', *uHn(subdot) - 'drink, eat',
*kaHn(subdot) - 'see, eye', *weHn- 'hear' ; (d) seven sets of  personal
pronouns *yaH-n : *yaH-m, etc. in which the length variation between the
nominative and  oblique stems can be explained; and finally, (e) PD or
Pre-Dravidian negative morpheme in verb inflection was reconstructed as
*aHa(H) which remained *aHa(H) in PSD, PCD and PND, but became *Ha(H) in
PSCD.  The PD laryngeal *H thus solves several  difficult  problems in
comparative Dravidian phonology.