Indian Linguistics - a Quarterly Bulletin of the Linguistic Society of India

The Tolkiippiyam the most ancient Tamil Grammar extant the age of which may go back to a period as early as the 4th Century B. C. in one of its rules in the Chapter on Orthography speaks3 of four words ending in V. The rule says that `v' is the terminal letter of four words in Tamil. [...] Caldwell himself saids that it is in the poetry and in the speech of the peasantry that the ancient condition of the language is best studied. [...] Even if the occurrence of 'y' as a plural neuter sign of the verb finite is doubtful its occurrence in the nominal forms is quite certain as evidenced by the passages quoted from the PariPlital and the Pur'anetn'ttir'tt which have `ay' 'iv' and `Ity' as neuter plurals of the remote proximate and intermediate demonstratives. [...] and The meaning of ayatana=`place of the sacred fire' would appear to be due to the influence of the OE. [...] a. If we examine the dialects represented in the Asokan Inscriptions the most striking syntactical feature about the dialect of the Shahbazgarhi version appears to be the preference for the genitive while that of the Kalil-1ga Edicts (including to a great extent the Girnar version) for the locative.