> dear Vk, > > Excellant detailed work. Just to make it clear - you are talking of > development of the script - we would also like to have similar on > language...meaning is you could also explain the diff between script > and language....sanskrit, prakrit, tamil - etc. the languages as we > see today, when did they evolve - was their evolution parallely > occuring with the evolution of the script. In laymans terms - we > cannot read the tamil inscriptions of RRC - when using todays tamil > script, but when someone reads it out for us we can understand, as > the words aka language is the same > > rgds > vj >
Dear VJ,
In the coming weeks, we shall see a large scale difference in the inscribed texts and the Cankam poetry. The inscriptions are highly colloquial wheras the Cankam poetry itself is scholarly. We will examine comments of scholars on this!
I can touch upon evolution of Sanskrit, Prakrit and Tamil itself. But the subject itself is so controversial and might trigger emotional arguments within the group. So is the dating and scholarly observations on the Neolithic-Chalcolithic Bronze Age-Iron Age Tamilnadu. I have avoided all contoversies and tried to put across the dates/information which makes common sense based on recent findings.
Over the next few weeks, readers of this series will be able to read Tamil-Brahmi inscriptions on their own! It can be extended to other scripts as well. This is something we wanted to do for our group.