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Home , Dravidian studies, Malayalam, Middle Tamil

FROM PROTO-TAMIL- TO WEST COAST *

by A. GOVINDANKUTTY Leiden University

Because the oldest Malayalam inscriptions and literary works 1 are not earlier than about the ninth century A.D. and accordingly were con- temporaneous with , scholars have almost automatically come under the delusion that the development of a separate had to be dated to that period. 2 While concentrating entirely upon this his- torical process of differentiation, they have consistently overlooked the

* I am indebted to Professor F. B. J. Kuiper, who made a number of very valuable comments and suggestions to improve the quality and contents of this article. I am grateful to Professor for a number of useful comments. 1 Since all ancient literary works written on the West Coast for a long time merely belonged to conventional genres of Tamil , their authors continued to write in the traditional literary language of the East Coast (cf. Cilappatikdram). Not until the fourteenth century approximately, are clear traces of 'Malayalisms' found in certain literary texts, such as the Rdmacaritam. Therefore, it is for a long time almost exclusively the evidence of the West Coast inscriptions that gives us some information about the linguistic changes that have gradually taken place. R. Caldwell, A Comparative of the Dravidian or South-Indian Family of (London, 1856), p. 12; 2nd ed. (1875), p. 23; 3rd ed. (1913, 1956), p. 18. He pointed out that Malayalam is an ancient offshoot of Tamil and regarded it rather as a dialect than as a distinct Dravidian language. Similarly, e.g., Jules Bloch, Structure grammaticale des langues dravidiennes (Paris, 1946), p. VIII ("... un dialecte d6tach6 du tamoul ...") and Emeneau, "The South ", JAOS, Vol. 87 (1967), p. 365. See also , "Comparative ", Current Trends in Linguistics, 5 (The Hague, Mouton, 1969), p. 327. Attempts to arrive at an exact dating of the separation were made by L. V. Ramaswami Aiyar and Kamil Zvelebil. The former stated that Malayalam, in its earlier stages, was more closely allied to what he denominated as Early Middle Tamil (see "Linguistic 'Preser- vations' in Malayfil.am", Journal of Oriental Research, Madras, Vol. XI [1937], p. 3). The latter pointed out that at the stage of linguistic development which he termed Late Old and Early Middle Tamil, Tamil and Malayalam were, very probably, basically one language, with Pre-Malayalam as a diverging western dialect of the spoken form of that common tongue (see "From Proto-South Dravidian to Malayalam", Archly Orientdlni, 38 [1970], p. 56). FROM PROTO-TAMIL-MALAYALAMTO WEST COAST DIALECTS 53 simple fact that West Coast dialects had preserved, from the earliest times onwards, features which are not found even in the oldest historical forms of Tamil proper, that is, the East Coast dialects. These features must consequently be traced back to a prehistoric form of Tamil. It can further be shown that in the West Coast speech some dialectal differences must have existed at an early date and that Malayalam must have developed from one of these dialects, while at least one other dialect must have disappeared in historical times, a It should be mentioned in this connection that a few scholars have put forward the view that Malayalam is an independent offshoot of Proto- Dravidian. Since this view would seem to be at variance with both the historical evidence and the methodological principles of historical lin- guistics, it is not necessary in the context of this paper to enter more deeply into a discussion of this theory. 4 This paper will deal with the historical relations between Tamil and Malayalam. In order to make clear this problem, however, it is necessary first to consider the position of Tamil within the whole group of South Dravidian languages.

Two of the most interesting features of South Dravidian are the alter- nations i/e and u/o and the palatalisation of - > c- before i. The vowel alternations have been studied by Caldwell, 5 Subbayya, e Sreekanthaiya, 7 Burrow 8 and Narasimhia 9 and, most elaborately, by Krishnamurti, 1~ who however limited his study to the four literary

3 A linguistic analysis of the language of the early Malayalam text R6maearitarn forces one to arrive at this conclusion. This conclusion will be developed elsewhere. 4 U.l!fir S. Param~swara Aiyar, K. Goda Varma, K. M. George and a few others maintained the view that Malayalam is an independent offshoot of Dravidian. See Vadasery I. Subrarnoniam, "Malayalam", Current Trends in Linguistics, 5 (The Hague, Mouton, 1969), p. 374. 5 R. Caldwell, op. cit., 2nd ed. (1875), Part I, pp. 77-79. 6 K. V. Subbayya, "Primer of Dravidian ", Indian Antiquary, Vol. 38 (1909), p. 160. 7 T.N. Sreekanthaiya, "The Mutation of I, U, E and O in ", Proceedings and Transactions of the Eighth All- Oriental Conference (, 1953), pp. 769- 800. Quoted by Bh. Krishnamurti but not accessible to me. 8 T. Burrow, "Dravidian Studies II", BSOS, Vol. 10, pp. 289-97. g A.N. Narasimhia, G.O.K.L, pp. 169-70. Quoted from G. S. Gai, HistoricalGramrnar of OM Kannada (= Deccan College Dissertation Series, 1) (Poona, 1946), p. 5. xo Bh. Krishnamurti, "Alternations i/e and u/o in South Dravidian", Language, Vol. 34 (1958), pp. 458-68.