Tamil aaytam

[Bh. Krishnamurti]

At 08:54 17/10/97 -0500, you wrote:
>Dr. Iravatham Mahadevan will be the ideal choice to know about
>aaytam in early tamil orthography. He can be reached at Institute
>of Asian studies, Madras. I hear that he is writing a book on
>early Tamil orthograpy. Atleast from I century BC, we have short
>tamil inscriptions.  Tamil corpus of medieval inscriptions is quite
>impressive.
>
>Dr. S. Raju (Head, Dept. of epigraphy, Tamil university, Thanjavur
>613005) and others will be able to tell about aaytam in medieval Tamil.
>
>There are some papers on aaytam in World Tamil conf. proceedings.
>May be somebody  under the guidance of Prof. V. I. Sunramoniam,
>Univ. of Kerala or some other Indian university has an M.A., or
>Ph.D thesis on aaytam?!
>
>N. Ganesan

Many thanks for your suggestions and those of Sudalaimuthu. I have read
evrything about aaytam (PSSasty, Kuiper, ACSekhar, Balasubramanian, et.).
None of these studies address the questions I have asked. I am in touch with
Iravatam Mahadevan. All he said was that aaytam occurs only from Medieval
Tamil. It has no symbol in Tamil Brahmi.
My paper gives all the information that you and Palani have said and more.
But I need more. Can VSRajam be rached by e-mail? if so I will appreciate.
PDr laryngeal is not in all respedts the Tamil aaytam. Ta. aaytam is a relic
reflex of PDlaryngeal *H. I extended the phonological behaviour broadly
attested in the case of OTa. aaytam to other cases where even OTa. lost the
reflexes of PDr *H, for instance in the numeral for "3", muH-, muu-,muu-nRu.
It occurred also before voiced stops (cf. muppaHtu, munnuuRu. Tamil
Linguists have not thought of the aaytam from a comparative point of view.
Tamil is not Proto-Dravidian. It is a descendant of the Southern branch of
Dravidian which has preserved some arhaic features in its early literary
works. Most traditional Tamil scholars hardly see the difference between the
two. Sinceerely, BhK.