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114 wordbuilding and combination. Including his famous Nannul there are about half-a-dozen authoritative treatises on grammar which were written at different times; but in every one of these the history of the Tamil alphabet has been studiedly avoided. The fact seems to be that the native grammarians kuew little of it, and their ignorance has led some of their commentators to bungle as regards certain points of historical import. It is therefore proposed to deal at the outset with the historical side of the Tamil alphabet at some length, touching very briefly on the other points connected therewith in the concluding part of the present essay.

The Tamil alphabet now in use is not what it was a thousand years ago. its form appears to have undergone changes from century to century until about the fourteenth, when it reached the present stereotyped condition. There were, however, two different kinds of writing in use in the Tamil country—the one introduced by the Brahmans and the other indigenous to the Tamil race. The former is known as the Grantha-Tamil alphabet, and it was the parent stock from which some of the modern Tamil characters have sprung, while the latter is called by palæographists as the Vatteluttu or the Chera-Pandya alphabet. The Tamil districts including Malabar and Travancore abound in inscriptions of both varieties,