peNNai, piNai, piNi, piTi ( RE:River Krishna)]

[S.Kalyanaraman]

"Chandrasekaran, Periannan"             
<Periannan.Chandrasekaran at DELTA-AIR.COM> wrote:
> Occurrences of "peNNai" in the long poems of the sangkam era's
> pattuppATTu anthologies"> "thIm peNNai maTal cErppavaum" (porunarARRuppaTai:
207)> ->"[the herons] staying in the leaves of the sweet palm tree"

pen.n.ai could be an abbreviate form of pen. pan-ai = female palmyra pal; the
component phonemes are perhaps unrelated to the river semant.

The distinction between male and female trees is that the male tree of a
species yields gum resin...

Regards,
Dr. S. Kalyanaraman

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