3.1.2. Introduction to Praise of God (Part 2) - From Sound to Silence

This is the tenth post and I still cannot enter the first Kural! In order to understand the depth of the first Kural, we need to understand the logic behind Tamil letters.

How did language come into existence?

In the earlier posts, I have explained how humans are blessed with the sixth sense called Manam  and that it helps to record events of our lives in all the births. With all the recordings, the Manam gets overloaded. Humans needed a way to lighten and there was a need to share the recordings. Thankfully nature has designed us such that when we share happy recordings our happiness doubles and when we share negative recordings our grief lessens. So we needed a mechanism to share our recordings. The need for language arose.

Today we are living in a world where we are all proficient in atleast two languages and are good at verbal and written communication. But think of the earliest man before the invention of language. How must he have communicated his ideas? Maybe by body movements or hand gestures? But that wasn’t enough to communicate ideas. He understood that he could make different sounds and then began the mode of communicating through sounds.

Early humans wanted to represent sound as a symbol and thus letters were born. The function of the letter is to recall a sound, that’s all. The symbol for a sound is also called as Aksharam. I don’t know who created Tamil letters, (the belief is Lord Shiva created the letters and Lord Muruga was the authority on the subject and he later passed it on to Sage Agathiyar and so on).

In Tamil there are a total of 30 alphabets. 12 are vowels and 18 are consonants. We have one letter called “ak” (ஃ) that is called Ayutha Letter. Letters were also assigned gender. All the vowels were masculine and all the consonants were feminine. “ak” (ஃ) is an Androgynous Letter. The vowels and consonants “mix” and 216 Uyir Mei letters are born (The rules for mixing are called “punarchi” rules. Punarchi literally means “mating”). In all, a total of 247 letters are there in Tamil.

Interestingly the vowels are called Soul letters (Uyir ezhuthukkal), Uyir means soul (or Atma) and the consonants are called Body letters (Mei ezhuthukkal), Mei means body. Why would they name the letters thus? They could have named them Clean and unclean letters or higher and lower letters or something like that. Why is there a reference to soul and body?

When we refer to a person, Ms. A for example, we refer to both the soul and the body of the person. Without soul, “it” is just a body, and without body “it” is just a ghost! So the name of a person refers to both soul and the body. We can see the body, but we cannot see the soul. We understand the presence of the soul indirectly, that is, because the body is working, we understand that the soul present.

A good language should be easy to understand. That means the rules have to be clear. The characteristics of a letter were defined as:

1.   One letter should represent one sound.

Letters were invented to recall a sound. There are no silent letters and all. It would be ridiculous, for instance, if I spelled amma as A-M-Maa-K and said K is silent!  What is the need to represent silence by different letters?  (Eg: In English we have words like Know, Phlegm, etc where k & g are silent, for which I haven’t found convincing reasons). Also there is no need for capital letters. (I’m not really sure what is the need for upper and lower case letters in English, besides visual harmony??)

2.   Each letter has a written form and a sound form. The written form may vary over time, but the sound should not change.

The sound of a letter cannot depend on individual words. If a letter is allowed to take a different sound in a word then such a modification will be observed in all similar words. For eg: the letter “ka” (க), can take the sound “ha” in words like, kaa-ka-m, Naa-ka-m, thaa-ka-m, but this will be a rule that will apply to all similar sounding words. That is, the modification can be stated as a rule like  “ka can take the sound ha when it comes between the nedil uyir-mei letter and mei letter”.

We can contrast this with English, to understand better. Eg: In English, the sound of the letter “u” is different in “but” and “put” or the sound of “o” in “hose”, “dose” and “lose” (Cow/how/low – beard/heard – good/food/blood). There is no rule to define these modifications, nothing that I am aware of atleast. We can learn these differences only by practice.

3.   The time to pronounce a letter was also defined.

“Mathirai” is a unit of time. It is equal to the time taken to bat the eyelid or the time taken to produce a sound with the middle finger pressed against the thumb and snapped. That unit of time is called one Mathirai.

Coming to the nature of humans. Our ancestors understood that masculine and feminine traits were found in all humans. We can have a man with more feminine traits and a woman with more masculine traits. Depending on the level of masculinity, men were classified as two types 1) Ones with Masculine traits and 2) Ones with Less Masculine traits. Depending on the level of Femininity, women were classified into three types 1) Extremely feminine (Mellinam) 2) High on masculine traits (Vallinam) 3) Somewhere in the middle (Idaiyinam).  In Ramayanam, when Sage Viswamitrar takes Raman to the forest he encounters Tataka , a Vallinam lady (Vallinam women are natural warriors), next he introduced him to Ahalya an example of Idaiyinam lady and finally to Sita who is a Mellinam lady who Raman eventually marries.

This classification was applied to letters too.

Vowels (masculine letters) are of two types. We have 7 letters that have to be sounded for 2 Mathirais (they are called Nedil letters) and 5 letters that have to be sounded for 1 mathirai (they are called kuril letters).

Consonants (female letters) have to be sounded for half a Mathirai.  Among consonants six are Vallinam, six are Mellinam, and six are Idaiyinam.

The letter “ak” (ஃ) is an androgynous letter because it sometimes assumes a masculine role and other times a feminine role in different places. It is mostly used in poetry and sometimes is sounded for 1 mathirai (like masculine letters) and sometimes sounded for half mathirai (like a feminine letter).

There is an interesting theory behind the birth of this letter. It is born in the middle of a Uyir Kuril (less masculine letter) and a Vallinam Uyir Mei. Our ancestors say that androgynous birth in humans occurs for a couple wherein a man with less masculine traits joins a woman with more masculine traits (Vallinam woman) at the time  when her masculine characters are at a peak. I am not aware of any recent research studies along these lines. (The BERN Sex Role Inventory measures how masculine or feminine a person is. It is widely used in gender studies. A study using this index among parents of androgynous children may throw light on this issue).

Uyir letters and Mei letters “mix” or “join” to form Uyir Mei letters. There are rules for this mixing. Take the following example.

க் (feminite letter) + அ (masculine letter) = க

ik + a = ka

Here, க் (ik) has half mathirai,  அ (a) has 1 mathirai but க (ka), the result has only 1 mathirai (Not one and half as expected).

When a body and soul are joined, the body is visible but the soul is hidden. Similarly, the result க (ka) takes on the function (sound and mathirai) of the soul (Uyir)  letter and the appearance of Body (Mei) letter க். And that is why letters were named as Soul letters (Uyir letters) and Body letters (Mei letters).

I cannot help but wonder, the depth of thought that has gone behind the creation of these letters. It seems almost like the language has a life of its own. Who would have thought to build all these ideas in the formation of language? I don’t know if any other language has a similar or even more marvelous thinking behind its construct.

Now, letters were born, and then letters were formed into words and sentences and so on. In the early days humans took a lot of words to express a simple idea. But as civilization advanced, people became adept at using fewer words to express their ideas. Five sentences were used in the place of ten. It then reduced to one sentence, and then to one word and one letter. A language is said to be advanced, if fewer words are used to express an idea. Tamilians didn’t take pride in inventing long words or creating wordy passages. The maximum length of a word is only seven (Uthratathi, which is a name of a star).  The language went a step further and allowed for one letter words (nee – You; vaa – come; thaa - Give; Po –Go). The language advanced some more -  and said some sounds without any letters could also be used for communication and formed a part of the language. For eg: a group of kids are playing nosily in the living room and the father arrives with his boss. As he enters the house he clears his throat. This sound of the throat clearing cannot be expressed in letters but it communicates a message to the children and they understand that their father needs a quiet place for his guest and clear the living room immediately.

Language developed further. Language developers said, sometimes even sound is not necessary to communicate. Eyes are enough. For eg:  A group of donation seekers come to a house on a Sunday afternoon asking the husband for money to build  a temple. The man takes his purse out, with the intention of giving Rs.5000, the wife gives a piercing look. He immediately understands her intention and gives out Rs.500! or a more familiar example, where a bunch of college boys are standing by the road and a busload of girls come by, hundreds of eye signals will communicate to each other to identify the pretty girls in the group. No sounds were used, when the minds are united at the Unarvu level (Refer post on Should Thirukkural be memorized) just silent glances are sufficient.

Communication started as hand gestures, later grew to many paragraphs and with the advancement of human mind, finally shrunk to mere glances. And then all of this was forgotten when it came to our current generation. The generations that came later, totally buried the significance of Tamil language, and failed to build on the works of ancestors. We are standing at a point where native Tamilians continue to dwell in darkness and celebrate with pride the newly found languages. There is nothing wrong with learning new languages, but to ignore a language that had so much thought behind its origin and that went through many stages of advancement, seems really foolish.

This blog itself is an attempt to communicate the essence of Tamil in English! J