Tamil-Brahmi

Tamil-Brahmi
Mangulam Tamil-Brahmi inscription at Dakshin Chithra, Chennai. It was discovered by Robert Sewell in 1882, and deciphered by Subrahmanya Aiyer in 1924.[1]
Script type
Time period
c. 3rd century BCE—c. 1st century CE
DirectionLeft-to-right Edit this on Wikidata
LanguagesOld Tamil
Related scripts
Parent systems
Child systems
Vatteluttu, Pallava[2]
Sister systems
Bhattiprolu, Gupta, Tocharian
The theorised Semitic origins of the Brahmi script are not universally agreed upon.
 This article contains phonetic transcriptions in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA. For the distinction between [ ], / / and ⟨ ⟩, see IPA § Brackets and transcription delimiters.
Brahmic scripts
The Brahmi script and its descendants
Northern Brahmic
Southern Brahmic

Tamil-Brahmi, also known as Tamili or Damili,[3] was a variant of the Brahmi script in southern India. It was used to write inscriptions in Old Tamil.[4] The Tamil-Brahmi script has been paleographically and stratigraphically dated between the third century BCE and the first century CE, and it constitutes the earliest known writing system evidenced in many parts of Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Andhra Pradesh and Sri Lanka. Tamil Brahmi inscriptions have been found on cave entrances, stone beds, potsherds, jar burials, coins,[5] seals, and rings.[4][6][7]

Tamil Brahmi resembles but differs in several minor ways from the Brahmi inscriptions found elsewhere on the Indian subcontinent such as the Edicts of Ashoka found in Andhra Pradesh.[8] It adds diacritics to several letters for sounds not found in Prakrit, producing ṉ ṟ ṛ ḷ. Secondly, in many of the inscriptions the inherent vowel has been discarded: A consonant written without diacritics represents the consonant alone, whereas the Ashokan diacritic for long ā is used for both ā and short a in Tamil-Brahmi. This is unique to Tamil-Brahmi and Bhattiprolu among the early Indian scripts. Tamil-Brahmi does not, however, share the odd forms of letters such as gh in Bhattiprolu. This appears to be an adaptation to Dravidian phonotactics, where words commonly end in consonants, as opposed to Prakrit, where this never occurs. According to Mahadevan, in the earliest stages of the script the inherent vowel was either abandoned, as above, or the bare consonant was ambiguous as to whether it implied a short a or not. Later stages of Tamil Brahmi returned to the inherent vowel that was the norm in ancient India.[8]

According to Kamil Zvelebil, Tamil-Brahmi script was the parent script that ultimately evolved into the later Vatteluttu and Tamil scripts.[2]

  1. ^ Rajan, K (2008), "Situating the Beginning of Early Historic Times in Tamil Nadu: Some Issues and Reflections", Social Scientist, 36 (1/2): 51
  2. ^ a b Cite error: The named reference Zvelebil1992p123 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  3. ^ Jain, Sagarmal (1998). "Jain Literature [From earliest time to c. 10th A.D.]". Aspects of Jainology: Volume VI.
  4. ^ a b Richard Salomon (1998) Indian Epigraphy: A Guide to the Study of Inscriptions in Sanskrit, Prakrit, and the other Indo-Aryan Languages, Oxford University Press, pages 35–36 with footnote 103
  5. ^ Rajan, K (2008), "Situating the Beginning of Early Historic Times in Tamil Nadu: Some Issues and Reflections", Social Scientist, 36 (1/2): 52
  6. ^ Cite error: The named reference mahadevan was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  7. ^ Zvelebil 1974, pp. 9 with footnote 12, 11–12.
  8. ^ a b Richard Salomon (1998) Indian Epigraphy: A Guide to the Study of Inscriptions in Sanskrit, Prakrit, and the other Indo-Aryan Languages, Oxford University Press, pages 31–36