Re: The term called Virama in Unicode - its history in India

From: N. Ganesan (naa.ganesan@gmail.com)
Date: Mon Jan 10 2011 - 11:38:02 CST

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    On Sun, Jan 9, 2011 at 1:18 PM, Christopher Miller <
    christophermiller@mac.com> wrote:

    > I would also be interested if anyone has pointers to information about
    > the origins of the theory of "inherent" -a in consonant aksharas.
    >

    You may want to see Iravatham Mahadevan, Early Tamil Epigraphy, Harvard
    Oriental Series, 2003.
    The earliest attestation of puLLi (vowel killer) in Tamil is dated to 78 CE
    in Satavahana coinage.
    Incidentally, this gives dating evidence for the puLLi in orthography
    described in grammar called Tolkappiyam.

    Sanskrit literature, the oldest is Vedas, remained Oral for a 1000 years or
    so, before committed to writing.
    The yoga meditation upon Vedic mantras is what gave birth to the Science of
    Phonetics for the World.
    Pl. read Prof. Frits Staal, UC, Berkeley's paper delivered before the
    Thailand royalty.
    http://dakshinatya.blogspot.com/2008/12/staal-sanskrit.html

    Whitehead's note on sukun in Arabic may also ultimately be influenced by
    Indic pulli/virama concepts.

    N. Ganesan

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