Old Tamil
RegionTamiḻakam, Ancient India
Era300 BCE to 700 CE
Tamil-Brahmi, later Vaṭṭeḻuttu and the Pallava script
Language codes
ISO 639-3oty
oty Old Tamil
Glottologoldt1248  Old Tamil
A 2nd-century BCE Tamil Brahmi inscription from Arittapatti, Madurai India. The southern state of Tamil Nadu has emerged as a major source of Brahmi inscriptions in Old Tamil dated between 3rd to 1st centuries BCE.[1][2][3]

Old Tamil is the period of the Tamil language spanning from 300 BCE to 700 CE and the many regional variations of it[4] including the ones in Kerala.[5] Prior to Old Tamil, the period of Tamil linguistic development is termed as Pre Tamil. After the Old Tamil period, Tamil becomes Middle Tamil. The earliest records in Old Tamil are inscriptions from between the 3rd and 1st century BCE in caves and on pottery. These inscriptions are written in a variant of the Brahmi script called Tamil Brahmi.[1][6][7] The earliest long text in Old Tamil is the Tolkāppiyam, an early work on Tamil grammar and poetics, whose oldest layers could be as old as the mid 2nd century BCE.[8][9] Old Tamil preserved many features of Proto-Dravidian, the earliest reconstructed form of the Dravidian including inventory of consonants, the syllable structure, and various grammatical features.

History

According to Bhadriraju Krishnamurti, Tamil, as a Dravidian language, descends from Proto-Dravidian, a proto-language. Linguistic reconstruction suggests that Proto-Dravidian was spoken around the third millennium BCE, possibly in the region around the lower Godavari river basin in peninsular India. The material evidence suggests that the speakers of Proto-Dravidian were of the culture associated with the Neolithic complexes of South India.[10] The earliest epigraphic attestations of Tamil are generally taken to have been written from the 2nd century BCE.[11]

Among Indian languages, Tamil has the most ancient non-Sanskritic Indian literature.[12] Scholars categorise the attested history of the language into three periods: Old Tamil (300 BCE–700 CE), Middle Tamil (700–1600) and Modern Tamil (1600–present).[8] In November 2007, an excavation at Quseir al Qadim revealed Ancient Egyptian pottery dating back to first century BCE with ancient Tamil Brahmi inscriptions.[13] There are a number of apparent Tamil loanwords in Biblical Hebrew dating to before 500 BCE, the oldest attestation of the language.[14] John Guy states that Tamil was the lingua franca for early maritime traders from India.[15]

Literary work

Many literary works in Old Tamil have also survived. These include a corpus of 2,381 poems collectively known as Sangam literature. These poems are usually dated to between the 3rd century BCE and 5th century CE,[8] which makes them the oldest extant body of secular literature in India.[16] Other literary works in Old Tamil include Thirukural, Silappatikaram and Maṇimēkalai, and a number of ethical and didactic texts, written between the 5th and 8th centuries.[8][9][nb 1]

Features

Old Tamil preserved many features of Proto-Dravidian, including inventory of consonants,[22] the syllable structure,[23] and various grammatical features.[24] Amongst these was the absence of a distinct present tense – like Proto-Dravidian, Old Tamil only had two tenses, the past and the "non-past". Old Tamil verbs also had a distinct negative conjugation (e.g. kāṇēṉ [kaːɳeːn] 𑀓𑀸𑀡𑁂𑀷𑁆 (காணேன்) (കാണേൻ)) "I do not see", kāṇōm [kaːɳoːm] (𑀓𑀸𑀡𑁄𑀫𑁆 (காணோம்) (കാണോമ്) "we do not see")[25] Nouns could take pronominal suffixes like verbs to express ideas: e.g. peṇṭirēm [peɳɖiɾeːm] 𑀧𑁳𑀡𑁆𑀝𑀺𑀭𑁂𑀫𑁆 (பெண்டிரேம்) (പെണ്ടിരേമ്) "we are women" formed from peṇṭir [peɳɖiɾ] 𑀧𑁳𑀡𑁆𑀝𑀺𑀭𑁆 (பெண்டிர்) (പെണ്ടിർ) "women" and the first person plural marker -ēm -𑀏𑀫𑁆 (-ஏம்) (-ഏമ്).[26] Despite the significant amount of grammatical and syntactical change between Old, Middle and Modern Tamil, Tamil demonstrates grammatical continuity across these stages: many characteristics of the later stages of the language have their roots in features of Old Tamil.[8]

Phonology

Old Tamil was restrictive in terms of Phonology in the following ways:

  • Word-initial prohibition of liquids, alveolar plosive, retroflex plosive and a few nasals (velar, alveolar).[27]
  • Voicing is not contrastive. Hence there is complementary distribution of voiceless and voiced stops - the former word-initially, as geminates and in plosive-plosive clusters, the latter in other contexts.[27]

Regional varieties

The 12 mozhipeyar regions of Ancient Tamilakam

The Tolkappiyam mentions about 12 moḻipeyar lands apart from the region where Centamil was spoken.[4] Tolkappiyam 881 also mentions about dialectical words called Ticaicol. However, being a language with an established literature, it served as the administrative language all across the Tamilakam. Ulloor S. Parameswara Iyer in his work, Kerala Sahithya Charithram names these regions. Senavaraiyar and Mayilainatar, both interpret almost similar names for these twelve Tamil dialectical regions of Old Tamil.[28]

See also

Notes

    1. ↑ The dating of Sangam literature and the identification of its language with Old Tamil was questioned by Herman Tieken who argued that the works are better understood as 9th century Pāṇṭiyan dynasty compositions, written in an archaising style to make them seem older than they were. Tieken's dating has, however, been criticised by multiple reviewers of his work.[17][18] [19][20][21]

    References

    1. 1 2 Mahadevan, I.Early Tamil Epigraphy pp. 91–94
    2. ↑ Mahadevan, I.Tamil-Brahmi Inscriptions pp. 1–12
    3. ↑ Souler, B. Handbook of Oriental Studies p. 44
    4. 1 2 Parameswara Iyer, Ulloor S. (1953). Kerala Sahithya Charithram, Part 1 (in Malayalam) (Digital ed.). Kerala: Kerala University. pp. 10–13. ISBN 9789354322914.
    5. ↑ "FROM PROTO-TAMIL-MALAYALAM TO WEST COAST DIALECTS" (PDF), BRILL, 1972, retrieved 25 March 2023
    6. ↑ Government of Tamilnadu, Department of Archeology. "Keeladi, Excavation Report, Urban Settlement, Sangam Age, River Vaigai". Retrieved 27 December 2020.
    7. ↑ Vishnupriya, Kolipakam (2018). "A Bayesian phylogenetic study of the Dravidian language family". Royal Society Open Science. 5 (3): 171504. Bibcode:2018RSOS....571504K. doi:10.1098/rsos.171504. PMC 5882685. PMID 29657761.
    8. 1 2 3 4 5 Lehmann 1998, pp. 75–76
    9. 1 2 Zvelebil, K. The Smile of Murugan: On Tamil Literature of South p.XX
    10. ↑ Southworth 2005, pp. 249–250
    11. ↑ Southworth 2005, pp. 250–251
    12. ↑ Sivathamby, K (1974), "Early South Indian Society and Economy: The Tinai Concept", Social Scientist, 3 (5): 20–37, doi:10.2307/3516448, JSTOR 3516448
    13. ↑ "Tamil Brahmi script in Egypt", The Hindu, 21 November 2007, retrieved 5 January 2015
    14. ↑ Rabin, C. Proceedings of the Second International Conference Seminar of Tamil Studies, p. 438
    15. ↑ Scroll.in – News. Politics. Culture., scroll.in
    16. ↑ Tharu & Lalita 1991, p. 70
    17. ↑ Tieken 2001
    18. ↑ Ferro-Luzzi, G. E.; Tieken, H. (2001). "Kavya in South India: Old Tamil Cankam Poetry". Asian Folklore Studies. 60 (2): 373. doi:10.2307/1179075. JSTOR 1179075.
    19. ↑ Monius, A. E.; Dubianskii, A. M.; Tieken, H. (2002). "Ritual and Mythological Sources of the Early Tamil Poetry". The Journal of Asian Studies. 61 (4): 1404. doi:10.2307/3096501. JSTOR 3096501.
    20. ↑ Wilden, E. V. A. (2003). "Towards an Internal Chronology of Old Tamil Cankam Literature or How to Trace the Laws of a Poetic Universe". Wiener Zeitschrift für die Kunde Südasiens. 1 (16): 105. doi:10.1553/wzksXLVIs105.
    21. ↑ R. Nagaswamy, Mirror of Tamil and Sanskrit (2012), Section 2.18.2: Natural evolution of Sanskrit
    22. ↑ Krishnamurti 2003, p. 53
    23. ↑ Krishnamurti 2003, p. 92
    24. ↑ Krishnamurti 2003, pp. 182–193
    25. ↑ Steever 1998, p. 24
    26. ↑ Lehmann 1998, p. 80
    27. 1 2 Krishnamurti, B. (2003). The dravidian languages. Cambridge University Press.
    28. ↑ M. Mena, Kannan (2009). "Negotiations with the Past: Classical Tamil in Contemporary Tamil". Journal of the American Oriental Society: 320–323 – via JSTOR.

    Sources

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