short "e" and long "E" in Kannada orthography

[Robert Zydenbos]

At 20:32 21.01.99 EST, Sudalaimuthu Palaniappan wrote:

>Can somebody tell me when short "e" and long "E" came to be differentiated
>orthographically in Kannada? Thanks in advance.

Caldwell's Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian Languages (repr. Madras, 1976, pp. 130-2) tells us that unlike the Tamil-Malayalam alphabet, Telugu-Canarese differentiated between long and short e and o from the beginning.

I have not been able to check the oldest (4th century) Kannada inscription yet. B. Ramachandra Rao's Descriptive Grammar of Pampa Bharata (Mysore, 1972) tells us that short and long e and o are distinguished in that text; again I have not been able to see old mss. yet, but Rao gives as an example pemku.li / peemku.li (p. 26); since the first syllable in both cases would be long anyway, the distinction must be orthographically visible, and not inferible from prosody.

RZ

Dr. Robert J. Zydenbos
Mysore (India)
e-mail zydenbos at bigfoot.com