Tamil aaytam

[Bh. Krishnamurti]

In reponse to Palaniappan's comments, I would like to say the following:
1.Alternations in vowel length are explainable in most cases in Dravidian,
e.g. *iir-/*ir-u 'two', paar-/par-a- 'to spread'(see my TVB,Vowel-length,
p.121); similarly the laternation in  paac-/pacc-, ciiR-/ciRR- is
explainable by morphophonemic rules which operated at the  Proto-Dravidian
stage.

2. I set up a laryngeal where length variation within paradigms
(inflectional or derivational)cannot be exlained by established rules, e.g.
*caa(y)-, ce-, ca- 'die', *waa-,waar-: war-V-, wa- 'come', *taa-,
taar-:tar-V-, tee-, tay-, ta- 'bring', etc. In the verb 'hear',we need
sveral reconstructions *wen-, win-, wiin (Te. wiinu 'ear');in this *weHn
>*weyn/*wiyn with loss of H/y before n and vowel length, vowel quality
change are all explained. Ancient Tamil aaytam becomes y in medeival
inscriptions. noo/noy is explainable without *H because *noy (with attested
y) contracts to noo. Ohter items like uuN-/uN-, kaaN-/kaN-, tiin-/tin- have
no *y in the etymology. The demonstrative bases aH, iH, yaH alteranate with
aa, ii, yaa  in PDr.I do not think that paa and paar are related in the same
way as waa and waar.

3. Tolk. sandhi h in muTTiitu, kaRRiitu is a case of reverse spelling. Since
h assimilates to the following voiceless stop, the geminate in external
(non-case)
sandhi is spelt as h+T, or h+R. Phonetically there is no way how the first
member of a geminate becomes lenitioned. This was posited as a spelling
convention in word sandhi to keep the identity of the conjoined words.

4. I sent copies of my paper to Professors Emeneau, Hans Hock, Henry
Hoenigswald  and George Cardona. If you live near any of these places you
may request for a copy of it.

5.It is difficult to give all the arguments here. What I need is more
information on (a)When was aaytam first found in the writing system?  (b)
why was it written with three circles, similar to Skt. visarga? (c) how does
one reconstrcut its phonetics in Old and Medeival Tamil? (d) Since h+P
(voiceless stop), contrasts with PP and P, h must have been a phoneme in
Early Tamil unlike the short u and short i with which Tolk classified it as
caarpeZuttu.

6. After TVB I hav been using *w for PDr because I think it was phonetically
a bilabial in PDr and not a labiodental. Further comments welcome. Bh.K.