Comp. ling.: Tamil Prakrit???

[Lakshmi Srinivas]

--- Michael Witzel <witzel at FAS.HARVARD.EDU> wrote:

> Dr. Sudalaimuthu Palaniappan:
> >The views of ..@@##%%..  praising Tamil by calling
> it a Prakrit
> >will be dismissed with outright contempt by even
> devout Tamilphile Hindu
> >Tamils.
>
> Dr. Palaniappan is of course right in denouncing the
> very idea of a "Tamil
> Prakrit". As any beginner should know, Prakrit
> always refers to  an
> INDO-ARYAN LANGUAGE, Middle Indo-Aryan, to be
> precise.

It's not terminological difference of opinion that's
really at issue here. I'm afraid the spirit of Dr
Palaniappan's original post is getting lost here in
some very fine philological hair splitting :-)

To my mind, Dr Palaniappan was suggesting that Tamil
was a Classical language on par with Sanskrit. To
quote the original post,

> In a nutshell, for these devout zaivas, Sanskrit and
> Tamil are equals. Prakrit is a shameful deformation
> of Sanskrit. So it cannot be Tamil's equal.
> campantar sang these verses in Madurai before his
> debates with the jains whom he criticized as
> speaking Prakrit and not knowing/speaking either
> Sanskrit or Tamil. appar praises ziva as one who
> became Sanskrit, Tamil, and four vedas.

Indeed, as AK Ramanujan once wrote, "Tamil, one of two
classical languages of India, is the only language of
contemporary India which is recognizably continuous
with a classical past."

> From the Afterword to The Interior andscape,
Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1975, p. 97.

Perhaps it is this recognizable continuity with its
Classical past which makes some people, sometimes even
professionals not particularly familiar with Tamil
literature, to say that Tamil is not a Classical
language.

I wonder if even they would call it a Prakrit.

Thanks and Warm Regards,

LS




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