Tamil aaytam

[Sudalaimuthu Palaniappan]

I misunderstood the nature of the model proposed by Bh. Krishnamurthy. I
thought he was presenting a more general model than he actually intended.

In any case, here are some comments regarding his specific questions.

<<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. >>

According to Tolkappiyam, H occurs only following a short vowel and preceding
one of the six hard consonants/obstruents, k, c, T, t, p, and R or during
puNarcci involving l and L with t (Tol. 1.2.5-6). Further Tol.1.3.19 says
that the dependent letters have their birth in the same place as the leeters
they are dependent on. This means Aytam is born in the same place as the
corresponding  hard consonant. Thus H occurs only in association with the six
hard consonants.  If Tolkappiyar is right, then this goes against  BhK's
model which has H followed by n, m, etc. From the context, it looks like H
might have been similar to the homorganic nasals. Some word pairs like
"pan2Ri" and "paHRi" meaning "pig" suggest this also.

Another clue about the pronunciation of H is given by the music-related
consonantal elongations called oRRu aLapeTai. According to nan2n2Ul, only the
following 11 consonants can undergo this elongation.

nasals - G, J, N, n, m, n2
liquids/semi-vowels - v, y, l, L
Aytam

In South Indian Classical music, the elongation of vowels and consonants is
called kArvai. KArvai is not done on any of the six hard consonants or "r" or
"z".  This means what the grammarians called as consonants which can be
elongated are really those letters on which kArvai can be done. A sound like
H will be very hard to do elongation or kArvai with.

The example given in nan2n2Ul for oRRu aLapeTai also hints at this
possibility.

vilaHHki vIGkiruL OTTumE mAtar
ilaHHku muttin2 in2am

vilaku/vilaGku means "to be transverse/across"
ilaku/ilaGku means "to shine"

In this example, the words with Aytam could theoretically represent either
the words with or words without the nasals.  However, the words with nasals
seem more probable because of the relative frequency of words with nasals.

yApparuGkalak kArikai gives varaHHku an example for Ayta aLapeTai. This seems
to suggest that to avoid the problem of not being able to elongate the hard
consonants, Aytam was introduced which might have represented a nasal (or a
related semivowel as l and n or L and N?) or something similar to it arising
out of the same place as the corresponding hard consonant.

One may need to do an exhaustive analysis of all possible occurrences of
Aytam as Dr. Ganesan did from TiruvAymozi.

As for the orthography, as V. S. Rajam has discussed in her dissertation,
Tolkappiyar seems to have attempted some orthographic innovations such as
indicating a pure consonant with a dot. The term "puLLi" used in conjunction
with Aytam seems to indicate, it is possible this was his innovation also. In
general, Tamil scribes ignored Tolkappiyar's suggestion (with a few
exceptions) regarding the use of dot for pure consonants. One may need to
search the corpus of inscriptions for the occurrence of Aytam. Articles by
Iravatham Mahadevan, T. V. Mahalingam, R. Nagaswamy, S. Raju may be useful.

By the way, Tolkappiyam clearly defines "v" as labio-dental.

Regards

S. Palaniappan