[INDOLOGY] Date of the Tolkappiyam

[Jan E.M. Houben]

Dear Paniappan,
As an old student of Prof. Kamil Zvelebil and of his student Dr Saskia
Kersenboom I am not convinced that his translation is wrong or outdated.
Moreover, even with his translation you can argue that the imperative is
prescriptive for the first time.
In other words, his translation is here only cited as a "strawman" with the
WISH to attribute a more ancient date to the Tolkāppiyam.
Since, however, the most generally accepted etymogy of  Tolkāppiyam is "old
Kāvya" and since Kāvya has a convincing etymology from the Vedic-Old
Persian kaví this grammar was apparently composed or at least "named" after
Sanskrit Kāvya developed as a literary phenomenon. Which would match the
datings proposed by Prof. Tieken in his recently reprinted study on this
issue.
Best regards,
Jan Houben


On 7 May 2018 at 00:52, Sudalaimuthu Palaniappan via INDOLOGY <
indology at list.indology.info> wrote:

> Responding to a query on the date of the Tolkāppiyam, I obtained some
> pages in the 2nd edition of *Early Tamil Epigraphy *(ETE) by Iravatham
> Mahadevan published in 2014. In his first edition Mahadevan had said on p.
> 231, “It is thus clear that this grammatical work must have been composed
> after the *puḷḷi* was invented and had become an integral part of Tamil
> writing. Judging from the available evidence of the earliest occurrence of
> the *puḷḷi* from about the end of the 1st century A.D., *Tolkāppiyam* was
> composed most probably not earlier than the Late Tamil-Brāhmī Period (ca.
> 2nd-4th centuries A.D.)” Unfortunately, Mahadevan had not consulted a
> crucial article by Rajam Ramamurti of 1982 entitled, "The Relevance of
> the Term Mey, Oṟṟu, and Puḷḷi To the System of Tamil Morpho-phonemics" in *International
> Journal of Dravidian Linguistics*, 11 , no. 1, pp. 167-183. In this
> article, it is stated:
>
>
> "From what Rule 106 says, we understand that there existed a convention,
> either earlier or contemporary, of marking an extra short *u* with a dot.
> The tone of Rules 15 and 105 in the Tolkāppiyam suggests that the author of
> the text made his own rule of marking a vowelless consonant with a dot.
>
>
>
> "It is possible that there existed in the pre-*Tolkāppiyam* period, the
> convention of marking an extra short *u* with a dot and the author of
> *Tolkāppiyam* extended the convention to the class of vowelless
> consonants..."
>
>
> In other words, it was Tolkāppiyar, the author of the Tolkāppiyam, who
> invented the convention of marking a pure consonant with a dot. This means
> that the Tolkāppiyam must precede any epigraphic occurrence of the dot (
> *puḷḷi*) and not after as Mahadevan has stated.
>
> The crux of the problem seems to be the interpretation of the rule
> *Tolkāppiyam* 15. Mahadevan has used Kamil Zvelebil’s outdated 1972
> translation, “The nature of the consonant is to be provided with a dot.”
> Ramamurti (1982:180)’s more precise translation using the
> imperative/optative interpretation is, "Let/May it be the nature of *mey*
> (consonant) to stay with a *puḷḷi* (dot).” If the use of dots to indicate
> pure consonants was already present, he would not have used the
> imperative/optative construction in the rule.
> ETE's 2nd edition’s bibliography includes the afore-mentioned article,
> Ramamurti (1982). (Both editions’ bibliographies also include V. S. Rajam’s
>  *A Reference Grammar of Classical Tamil Poetry, *wherein the
> imperative/optative use of verbal noun is discussed on p. 820.)  But in
> the discussion on *puḷḷi* in ETE's 2nd edition, Mahadevan does not
> discuss Ramamurti (1982) but essentially presents the same date for
> Tolkāppiyam as in the first edition. See attachment. Mahadevan has not
> discussed why he still maintained his earlier conclusion.  Has there been
> any discussion of this issue by anybody else?
>
> Thanks
>
> Regards,
> Palaniappan
>
>
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-- 

*Jan E.M. Houben*

Directeur d'Études, Professor of South Asian History and Philology

*Sources et histoire de la tradition sanskrite*

École Pratique des Hautes Études (EPHE, PSL - Université Paris)

*Sciences historiques et philologiques *

54, rue Saint-Jacques, CS 20525 – 75005 Paris

*johannes.houben at ephe.sorbonne.fr <johannes.houben at ephe.sorbonne.fr>*

*johannes.houben at ephe.psl.eu <johannes.houben at ephe.psl.eu>*

*https://ephe-sorbonne.academia.edu/JanEMHouben
<https://ephe-sorbonne.academia.edu/JanEMHouben>*

[image: 1506959459738_Signature]


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