Tamil Brahmi and Sinhala Brahmi made easy

Published in my column in The Nation on February 17, 2013 

By Darshanie Ratnawalli

                        The Elara Vs Dutugemunu as depicted on a mural from Dambulla

Today the vast majority of common people in Sri Lanka can distinguish between a language and its script. They may not be able to articulate what the difference is, but instinctively they know. I surmise that this instinctive knowledge came with their exposure to European languages, where the Latin script is used to write a multitude of different languages. If their experience had been limited to the two local languages that have their own specific scripts, the Sri Lankan proletariat too would have been trapped in a quagmire of Chandre Dharmawardana like ignorance and been reduced to equating languages with scripts. Luckily, the commonest man has daily dealings with at least two scripts and two languages, often using the Latin script to write native languages in forums that don’t support vernacular scripts. Sometimes the Sinhalese common man writes English and Tamil in the Sinhala script during the course of language lessons given in Sinhala.

Take English and Portuguese, both written in the Latin script. In the Latin-Portuguese script a lot of irritating (to an exclusive English reader) diacritics (dots and squiggles and thingies above and below letters) occur and while some digraphs in the Portuguese Latin script (ch)would be familiar to an English only reader, there are other digraphs (lh and nh) that would be gobble-de-gook. Still there’s no denying that the scripts used to write English and Portuguese are the same. But it would be a rare simpleton in the modern day who would conclude that the English and Portuguese languages are close dialects. But apparently, simpletons are far from rare when the subject is ancient languages.

Speech dialects

See this candid display of ignorance by Chandre Dharmawardana; “The language in BCE Sri Lanka was a form of Prakrit. The distinctions between Tamil Brahmi and Sinhala Brahmi at the time were perhaps not even that between Brooklyn English and Texan English.”- (The Nation, 10/02/2013). Here we see an academic, albeit in a field unrelated to history, nevertheless commenting on history with an air of authority, hopelessly confusing scripts and languages; likening the distinction between two scripts (Tamil Brahmi and Sinhala Brahmi) to that between two speech dialects of the same language.

Dr. Dharmawardana has been frolicking in public under the staggering misconception that Brahmi is the name of a language and using Prakrit and Brahmi as synonyms. Even his presentation to the Royal Asiatic Society, SL was not free from this error; “Swaminathaiyaar interpreted cave inscriptions in Tamil Nadu as Prakrit. This is the main-stream view. Subraaniya-Aiyar in the 1930s began to make claims for a “Tamil Prakrit”, a minor variant of Prakrit, blown up by Tamil-Nadu Nationalism. Claims of “Tamil Brahmi” potsherds in SL. The Dravidian scholar Iravatham Mahadeva began the spin. Pushparatnam (Jaffna University), and P. Ragupathy have expanded the spin.”

Tamil Prakrit

No one in this world has made claims for a ‘Tamil Prakrit, a minor variant of Prakrit’. The claims have been made for ‘Tamil Brahmi’, the result of specially adapting the original, standard Brahmi script to write the Tamil language, which has sound values not known to the Indo-Aryan language family, the Prakrits.

The following excerpt from a review by R. Champakalakshmi of Iravatham Mahadevan’s ‘Early Tamil Epigraphy. From the Earliest Times to the Sixth Century A.D.’ will help unravel many of Chandre’s nonsensical convolutions.

“The early Brahmi inscriptions (of Tamil Nadu) posed a greater challenge on account of their archaic characters and orthographic conventions, which were different from the original Brahmi used for Prakrit. The challenge seemed insuperable even to the most competent among the pioneering epigraphists. The major breakthrough in the decipherment of the cave inscriptions of Tamil Nadu came with K.V. Subrahmanya Aiyer (1924). He was the first to recognise that these are inscribed in Brahmi, but with certain peculiarities and new forms of letters, due to its adaptation for the Tamil language which has sounds (phonetic values) not known to the Prakrit (Indo-Aryan) language and northern Brahmi script. Yet, this lead was not seriously followed and was soon forgotten. Even Subrahmanya Aiyer did not pursue his line of enquiry to its logical conclusion.

Other scholars like V. Venkayya and H. Krishna Sastri were constrained by the assumption that all Brahmi inscriptions were invariably in Prakrit or Pali, as Brahmi was used predominantly for Prakrit in all other regions of India from the Mauryan (Asokan) period. Their readings failed to convey any meaning. By reviving Subrahmanya Aiyer's early decipherment and reading and at the same time more systematically studying these inscriptions in all their aspects, including palaeography, orthography and grammar, and seeking corroboration from the early Sangam classics and the Tolkappiyam, … Mahadevan has virtually re-deciphered these inscriptions and shown them to be inscribed in Tamil. Hence the name "Tamil-Brahmi," one variety of the Brahmi script…there is clear evidence of mutual influence between the Tamil-Brahmi and the Simhala-Brahmi, although the latter is used for Simhala-Prakrit, a Middle-Indo-Aryan language, and the former for Tamil, a Dravidian language. Simhala-Brahmi and Tamil-Brahmi show certain orthographic similarities and peculiarities. It is interesting that recent Sri Lankan archaeological and epigraphical studies have also recognised this interaction and influence…”

Not everyone believes in ‘Tamil Brahmi’ as a separate and distinctive entity. Raj Somadeva contends  that even the early Brahmi inscriptions in Tamil quoted in Mahadevan’s book confirms that the South Indian Brahmi inscriptions contain in the main, Northern Brahmi characters with a few rare exceptions. He points out during his alternate reading of the contested Tissamaharama potsherd that many of the early South Indian Brahmi lithic inscriptions in old Tamil use the letter ‘ra’ of the Asokan Brahmi script. Only a few South Indian inscriptions actually use the modified letter ‘ra’ (formed by reversing the letter ‘da’ of standard Brahmi) assigned for Tamil Brahmi. While one old Tamil lithic record uses both forms of ‘ra’ in the same sentence. He then shows that reversing of the standard Brahmi letter ‘da’ is seen in two of the Sinhala Brahmi lithic inscriptions from SL as an idiosyncratic usage but is still read as ‘da’. He questions the justification for preferring ‘ra’ over ‘da’ for the contested letter form.

An inexact man in an inexact science

Published in my column in The Nation on February 10, 2013 

By Darshanie Ratnawalli

                        Taking a tracing

“When it comes to ancient history, historical linguistics and such matters, surprisingly little is known in any tangible sense although much is claimed by the practitioners of such studies. ... We are not questioning the importance of such studies. But we insist that where little is known, little is known.”

So says Chandre Dharmawardana that famous emissary from exact sciences arrived on the social sciences scene to explode the ‘pretense of knowledge cultivated by social scientists’ and show that it’s ‘more relevant to emphasize our quasi-total lack of knowledge’. But there’s a problem. When Chandre Dharmawardana insists that little is known, it usually means that little is known by Chandre Dharmawardana. This is usually due to a substandard facility for acquiring knowledge than to an actual lacuna in the body of knowledge. When Chandre signals us to emphasize our quasi-total lack of knowledge, he is really asking us to empathize with his personal lack of knowledge.

It starts from basics, this personal lack of knowledge and continues upwards. The evidence strongly points to Chandre having missed many of the ‘Elementary my dear Watson’s of the ancient period: i.e. Brahmi is not a language, but a script, Prakrit is a Middle Indo Aryan language while Tamil is a Dravidian language and using the oxy-moron Tamil-Prakrit is an obvious way of displaying your ignorance.

I present exhibit A; “…a form of southern Prakrit known as ‘Elu’ seems to have been prevalent in Lanka, and was close to Asokan Brahmi. Another southern Parkrit (sic), called Tamil-Parkrit (sic) by Mahadevan is also close to Elu-prakrit”- (from ‘Regarding Thamilians and Inscriptions’: 2012: Chandre writing as ‘Gam Vaesiya’)

First, ‘Elu’ is not the name of any Prakrit but the name given for poetic Sinhala. Between centuries 10th and 15th A.D. written Sinhala “was internally diglossic, employing one “alphabet” for writing Sinhala poetry and one for Sinhala prose. The script was the same for both; the difference between the two was the number of permitted letters (aksaras), prose having fifty-seven, against thirty six for poetry. The alphabet for poetic Sinhala (elu) prevented the use of many Sanskrit loanwords (tatsamas) because it lacked letters for the aspirated consonants of Sanskrit, although Sanskrit loanwords became… common in Sinhala prose …in spoken Sinhala too, as well as in Sinhala Buddhist discourse: the Sanskritic dharmaya (Truth, the Buddha’s Teaching) is far more common than daham or dähäm found in elu…On the other hand, poetic Sinhala frequently privileged the ä vowel (e.g., dähäm) and the half-nasal, which are not found in Sanskrit or Pali…” –(Charles Hallisey, ‘Works and Persons in Sinhala Literary Culture’). Elu is not a Prakrit, but a spawn of the literary tradition that begot the Sigiri poetry (8, 9, 10 centuries A.D.) and eventually became the ideological ancestor of the language affected by the Hela Hawula.

Secondly, a man who boldly goes public with the statement that the prevalent language in Lanka (a Prakrit) was close to a script (Asokan Brahmi) is a man who has taken ‘pretense of knowledge’ to a level that no man has taken it before. Nevertheless, it is education such a man deserves not ridicule. I fought with my baser instincts to keep the ridicule at bay. It was hard, especially when I contemplated Exhibit B; “…it is very unlikely that such ethnic feelings or differences existed in, say, 5th or 6th century BCE. Those days Lanka most probably had its own form of southern Brahmi or Elu- Prakrit, very close to what we know today as ‘Tamil Brahmi’…” –(e mail note from Chandre to Michael Roberts)

Chandre’s Elu, a southern Prakrit is close to Asokan Brahmi. It’s also close to Tamil Prakrit (a fellow southern Prakrit). Even this is not enough closeness for Elu. It’s also very close to Tamil Brahmi. This is a linguistic ‘Bold and the Beautiful’. Elu is the eternally fascinating Brooke, who was recently accidently close to her daughter’s boyfriend, having been close earlier to the said daughter’s father, who was incidentally the husband of an older daughter, whose father she was also close to in the midst of being close to his son.

In reality the ancient languages are not so catholic and follow patterns more conducive to sanity. First it’s important to understand, in order to avoid gaffes like ‘The prevalent language of Lanka was close to Asokan Brahmi’, that Brahmi is an ancient script used to write many of South Asia’s languages before they developed their own vernacular scripts and is therefore considered ‘the ancestor of most of South Asia's modern vernacular scripts’(Coningham et al:96). ‘The earliest accepted examples of this script’ used to be ‘the pillar and rock inscriptions of the Mauryan emperor, Asoka, dating to the middle of the third century BC’. ‘Passage to India? Anuradhapura and the Early Use of the Brahmi Script’, Coningham et al: 1996, displaced Asokan Brahmi from this pioneer pedestal and announced that “Sherds inscribed with this script, recently found at Anuradhapura, with dates of the beginning of the fourth century BC, now represent its earliest dated examples anywhere in the subcontinent”. It countered the model that cast Sri Lanka as merely ‘the recipient of material culture diffused from more northerly regions’ and suggested that ‘Sri Lanka may have played a pivotal role in the development of Brahmi’ . Have to stop now. More next week.

Who is Chandre Dharmawardana?

A response to ‘What to do with Dharshanie Ratnawalli?’

Published in my column in The Nation on January 27, 2013 

By Darshanie Ratnawalli

I view with extreme concern Dr. Dharmawardana’s efforts to extricate himself from a past indiscretion. This was committed when he confided to Dr. Michael Roberts in an email note that the inscriptions of Lanka in the second century B.C. are really not Sinhala or Tamil and that the utmost that can be claimed was that a betting man would be justified in placing the odds on Sinhala because the Prakrit is close to Pali. This was the gist of the part of his email note, which by reason of its extraordinary asininity impressed me. It goes;

“I personally think there were no Damila or Sinhala in the 2nd century BC. The inscriptions are really not Sinhala or Tamil. The Sinhala has an advantage because the Prakrit is close to Pali, but I personally think the ethnic distinctions came up probably after wars of Dutugamunu…”

The lexical definition of asinine is ‘failing to exercise intelligence or judgment; ridiculously below average rationality’. A more asinine statement than the above cannot be imagined, unless it’s the following written by Chandre to excuse the above.

“This is not a statement of linguistic history, but a judgment about the onset of ethnic consciousness.”

It is indeed a statement on linguistic history. ‘The inscriptions are really not Sinhala or Tamil. The Sinhala has an advantage because the Prakrit is close to Pali…’ brings it firmly into the ambit of linguistic history. The primary purpose of the statement is to declare a personal belief that in the second century B.C. there were no ethnic distinctions, no ethnic labels. While this personal belief represents a new height of asininity, it was not (and is not, even now) my intention to deal with it (It demands its own separate space). My intention was to pass lightly over it and batten down on the real treasure; which is the appalling gap in Chandre’s knowledge about the language of the 2nd century B.C. inscriptions. ‘The Inscriptions are really not Sinhala or Tamil. The Sinhala has an advantage because the Prakrit is close to Pali....’ represents the attempts of a man to fill this knowledge gap with speculation arising from the said personal belief.

Would a man who had heard at least through hearsay, of a Geiger identifying the language of the stone Brahmi inscriptions of Lanka as the oldest form of the Sinhalese language, of a Senarat Paranavithana describing the same inscriptions as being in old Sinhala, of a James W. Gair talking about inscriptions in old Sinhala dating from the early second or late third centuries B.C. of an Iravatham Mahadevan declaring that among the inscribed potsherds found in Tamil Nadu, a small but significant group is in the Sinhala-Prakrit language written in the Early Sinhala-Brahmi script, have written that the inscriptions are really not Sinhala or Tamil? More critically, having said that and upon being exposed, what kind of a man continues to insist that what he said is consistent with what Geiger said? An asinine man. Chandre’s 'The inscriptions are really not Sinhala or Tamil’ is light years from being consistent with Geiger’s ‘The inscriptions are in the oldest form of Sinhalese called Sinhalese Prakrit’. They clash horribly.

I had just remarked in my 9th December 2012 column ‘Language Problem of Speaking Stones’;

“The number of academics in history and related disciplines together with those in unrelated disciplines but dabbling in history out of keen interest, who do not know what language the cave inscriptions of Lanka are written in, would fill a good sized tourist bus. This is a bold surmise based on three clues uncovered during my personal investigations.”

The third clue was none other than this email note from Chandre to Michael. To get permission to use it, I wrote to Michael Roberts first;

“Dear Dr. Roberts following is a note from Chandre D that you sent to me some time ago. In my last article, I talked of 3 clues that led me to believe that people are clueless about the Brahmi inscriptions. This is the third clue. Could you possibly write to Chandre D and get his permission for me to quote the red text as coming from him to illustrate the state of knowledge that exists in the public realm on the language of the Brahmi scripts?”

Here I appended the entire e mail note with the relevant portion marked in red. The whole was then forwarded by Roberts to Dharmawardana with this explanatory note (Cc to me);

“Chandre, I received this note from Darshanie Ratnawalli. Do please respond to her request. I believe both of you will benefit from exchanges of views and research findings. Michael”

The crux of this note, which was the request for the permission was somehow missed by Chandre so I tried again (Cc Roberts);

“Dear Dr. Dharmawardena. I understand that you are busy right now. At this stage, the only assistance I want from you is permission to use the first part of your email note to Dr. Roberts (which he sent to me some time ago) attributing it to you by name, in my next article as an illustrative example of the current state of public awareness on the language of the Brahmi scripts of Lanka. The part of your note I am interested in goes;…I want to clinically dissect the forces that may have resulted in the state of knowledge revealed in the above excerpt from you. May I assume I have your permission to refer to this as a communiqué from you?”

This time I seemed to get through and the rest is history. But after all these explanations, what sort of a man writes; “I was not aware of what Ratnawalli wanted, she gave no clues to it and did not ask for any clarifications… So I was surprised to see a newspaper article!”? An asinine man. .

What to do about Dr. Chandre Dharmawardana?

Published in my column in The Nation on December 23, 2012 

By Darshanie Ratnawalli

I am in a moral quandary over what to do about Chandre Dharmawardana. Should I look askance at this professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Montreal, shuddering with horrified wonder as if he is a mutant worm or should I use the situation to cultivate equanimity? The arguments for both courses of action are equally strong in my mind. For looking askance, he has shown himself fundamentally clueless about the history of languages in Sri Lanka. It is pretty shudder-worthy when a person who claims a degree of expertise in the historical development of place names of Sri Lanka (http://dh-web.org/place.names/), reveals himself to be clueless about the linguistic evolution thereof. This is why I couldn’t stop shuddering when I read the following communication from Dr. Dharmawardana.

“I personally think there were no Damila or Sinhala in the 2nd century BC. The inscriptions are really not Sinhala or Tamil. The Sinhala has an advantage because the Parkrit is close to Pali, but I personally think the ethnic distinctions came up probably after wars of Dutugamunu…”

In favour of cultivating equanimity and dropping the shudder, Dr. Dharmawardana was very cooperative when I asked his permission to use this personal email note sent by him to a third party. I fully expected him to stall, cringe in shame and invoke his right to keep his email communications private. Instead he was breezy; “Of course, you have the permission to use that material. I assumed that the material was already in the public domain! I am glad this is an easy request.” Indeed he was all “Indeed, I am interested in what Darshanie is doing, and would be very willing to help her where ever I can…” and made me cringe that I had shuddered and not possessed the equanimity to see that sometimes, a mistake just deserves correcting.

Mistake could be too light a word however, to describe the yawning chasm that exists between the current knowledge in historical linguistics and Dharmawardana’s personal take on it. Was linguistics in Sri Lanka ever in the simpleton stage conceived by Chandre? A linguist standing in front of the Brahmi lithic records, scratching head and wondering ‘Sinhalese or Tamil hmm? Reads like Pali. So closer to Sinhala? Doesn’t really sound like either to me.’ Even by 1938, there was Wilhelm Geiger making ‘a proper historical analysis of the Sinhala language’ and giving ‘the name Sinhalese Prakrit to the earliest form’ of the Sinhalese language ‘as found in the Brahmi inscriptions.’ Now it’s advanced enough to tell us that the Prakrit, a Middle Indo-Aryan language that came to the island probably around 6th century B.C. underwent changes that made it different from all other Prakrits in India. By the time inscriptions started being written on stone in centuries 3rd /2nd B.C., these changes had already taken place. These changes were the harbingers of the present Sinhala language; hence the language of the Brahmi stone inscriptions of Sri Lanka is named old Sinhala/Sinhalese Prakrit. Historical linguistics in Sri Lanka is advanced enough to trace which change harbingered which characteristic of the present language. ““Furthermore, the lack of diphthongs in Sinhala resulted largely from changes such as ay(a)>e and av(a)>o occurring prior to the earliest inscriptions...”-(Gair:1985 ). It’s also possible for historical linguists to trace the evolutionary journeys taken by the Prakrit called old Sinhala in contradistinction to all other Prakrits of the Indian mainland. “…Sinhala appears to have retained the OIA (Old Indo Aryan) distinction between retro-flex and nonretroflex nasals longer than any other IA language. The distinction was retained in Pali…but they are merged in one direction or the other in latter Prakrits except for old Sinhala. This by itself, of course, points to the relatively early transfer of Sinhala to the island, in time to miss the general merger on the mainland. The distinction was retained in Sinhala until about the eighth century …then it was lost.”- (ibid)

The source of Chandre’s misdirection would be hard to determine without telepathy. Multiple sources could be involved. One of them is sure to be ‘The Evolution…’ by K. Indrapala. This book is strewn with traps to trip the cognitively careless. Nearly always, Indrapala uses the generic name Prakrit for the language of the stone Brahmi inscriptions of Sri Lanka even when the context cries out for the specific name; “The earliest stone inscriptions in Sri Lanka, datable to about the second century BCE are all in Prakrit… The earliest stone inscriptions in Tamil Nadu, also datable to the second century BCE, are in Old Tamil but betray influence of Prakrit”- (p.89). In contrast, he uses Old Tamil and Tamil interchangeably just as Gair in the above quotes uses Sinhala and old Sinhala interchangeably. The term ‘Sinhalese Prakrit.’ is confined to three far apart pages of the book. Page 91, under the heading Sinhalese-Prakrit, carries several references including “The language of the earliest records is a form of Prakrit, often referred to as Sinhalese-Prakrit…”

Page 337 (an end note page) remarkably uses Sinhalese –Prakrit and Old Sinhalese interchangeably. This refers to recent writings by Tamil Nadu scholars appreciating the flow of influences from ancient SL to their region: P. Jeyakumar- evidence from Tamil Nadu potsherd graffiti ‘showing influences of Sri Lankan Brahmi and Sinhalese-Prakrit.’: Iravatham Mahadevan- ‘among the inscribed potsherds found in Tamil Nadu, a small but significant group’ is in ‘Sinhala-Prakrit language written in the Early Sinhala-Brahmi script’: Some interesting articles by Mahadevan; ‘An Old Sinhalese Inscription from Arikamedu’, ‘Old Sinhalese Inscriptions from Indian Ports…’: S. Iracavelu has read ‘a remarkable graffito in Prakrit from the ancient port of Kaveripattinam’ as ‘a Sinhalese-Brahmi inscription’.