Emergence of Tamil as Epigraphic Language: Issues in Tamil Historical Linguistics
Résumé
The language of inscriptional Tamil is very intriguing despite its complexity for many reasons including its properties such as extensive code-mix between Indo Aryan and Tamil, adaptation of different scripts and so on. The Tamil epigraphic routines or more specifically the Tamil epigraphic culture developed mostly under a pan-Indian cultural, historic and sociolinguistic context and model. The raise of Tamil as epigraphic language should be seen as a dynamic process. As can be seen from palaeographic, lexical, syntactic and semantic features, a separate variety of epigraphic Tamil evolved constantly alongside of the literary varieties. Much of the credit goes to many pioneering epigraphists and scholars for their continued contribution to the development of the fields of Indian and Tamil epigraphic studies for more than a century despite the lack of encouragements from the scholarly circle, whose attention was paid mostly to Tamil literature and history. However, the linguistic study of Tamil inscriptions is in a nascent stage. In this present work on the emergence of Tamil as inscriptional language, I would like to present succinctly, from a historical linguistic point of view, two aspects: 1) the process of Indo-Aryanisation and 2) a few salient syntactic features of inscriptional Tamil.
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