Mixing Languages and Scripts in Tamil Inscriptions and Manuscripts

Emmanuel Francis (1)

1 CESAH - Centre d'études sud asiatiques et himalayennes

This chapter focuses on two periods in the history of writing texts in the Tamil language in the present-day Tamil Nadu state of South India. The first period starts around 600 CE, when two different alphabets – the Grantha and the Tamil alphabets – were designed to write texts in Sanskrit and Tamil, re-spectively. One can observe for several centuries onwards that Sanskrit loan-words are often written in their specific Grantha alphabet in Tamil inscriptions. The second period is attested in Tamil manuscripts, most of which are dated to the eighteenth and nineteenth century CE. These manuscripts evince new prac-tices of script-mixing, the most conspicuous being the creation of conjunct graphemes mixing Grantha and Tamil alphabets.

Mots clés: Tamil; Epigraphy; Manuscripts; Scripts; Multilinguism

Domaines: Linguistique

Emmanuel Francis. Mixing Languages and Scripts in Tamil Inscriptions and Manuscripts. Szilvia Sövegjártó; Márton Vér. Exploring Multilingualism and Multiscriptism in Written Artefacts, 38, De Gruyter, pp.205-234, 2024, Studies in Manuscript Cultures, 9783111380483. ⟨10.1515/9783111380544-008⟩. ⟨halshs-04557743⟩