Black and Bright and Beautiful

[C.R. Selvakumar]

'>'
'>'"C.R. Selvakumar" <selvakum at VALLUVAR.UWATERLOO.CA> wrote:
'>'
'>'>     As far as I know Tamil Brahmins, by and large,
'>'>     do not name their children in Tamil. So it is
'>'....
'>'>     I don't know whether this was the situation, say some 1000 years ago.
'>'>
'>'
'>'Even a 100 years ago, it wasn't so. One common first
'>'name one can find among Tamil Brahmins of an earlier
'>'generation is Picchai/Picchappa/Pichumani. My father
'>'was officially named Sundaresan, but my grandmother
'>'called him Picchappa, at home. I know at least two
'>'Tamil Brahmin men named Murugan. Another feature was
'>'the use of double names, one in Sanskrit and one in
'>'Tamil. One of my ancestresses was called "aramaNattA
'>'pATTi". It took me a while to infer that this name
'>'was a version of Tamil aRam-vaLarttAL, i.e. Sanskrit
'>'dharma-samvardhinI. There is also a fairly high
'>'incidence of Tamil names among zrIvaishNavas, e.g.
'>'Kannan, Perundevi, and names ending in valli/vaLLi.

    I am glad, and pleasantly surprised
    to know that some brahmins have names like
    Murugan. What do you think would be the percentage
    (obviously only based on smaller samples, familiar to us)
    of Tamil names ? Would it be more than 1-2% ?

    Thanks

    C.R.Selvakumar


'>'
'>'Vidyasankar