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CHAPTER VI
SANSKRIT LOAN WORDS IN THE CIVAKACINTAMANI
As the Cc. is a religious work written in an epic form it has two kinds of loan words in it. One, the Jaina technical terms and the other the non-religious terms. We treat these two kinds of loan words under separate sections. Before starting to analyse the Skt. loan words in the Cc, it is necessary to have a brief knowledge of the growth of Skt. loan words in Tamil literature before the period of the Cc.
From the linguistic point of view the growth of the Tamil language can be divided into three major periods. 1
(i) Old Tamil (ii) Middle Tamil period
(iii) Modern Tamil period In these three main periods the Cc. was composed in the Middle Tamil period. We trace here the developments in the Skt. loan words in the Tamil literature from the very early time to the period in which the Cc. was composed.
In identifying the loan words, as M. B. Emeneau says, “ details of morphology, and of meaning, as well as of phonology must be brought into play.."9 It is easy to make out a Skt. loan word, for the Indo-European vocabulary of Skt. has been long worked out and established. 8 Therefore, the words which cannot be explained by Dravidian phonetic and etymological phenomena, and which can be traced back to IndoAryan etymology, can be noted as Skt. loan words. There are also a few words which appear in the etymology of both the groups of languages, Indo-European and Dravidian and these have discussed by philologists like Burrow and Emeneau.
In the Cankam period when the two different cultures, Aryan and Dravidian, got intermingled, many words which the Aryans used in their social life found their
1 S. Vaidyanathan, Indo-Aryan loan-words in the Civakacintāmaņi", Journal of the
American Oriental Society, 87.4, 1967, p. 430. 2 M. B. Emeneau, India and Historical Grammar, Annamalai University Publications in
Linguistics, No. 5, 1965, p. 13 3 T. Burrow, Transactions of the Philological Society, London, 1946, p. 13. 4 T. Burrow and M. B. Emeneau, Dravidian Etymological Dictionary, Oxford, 1961.
Dravidian borrowing from Indo-Aryan, University California Publications in Linguistics, Vol. 26, 1962. T. Burrow. "Loan words in Sanskrit", Transactions of the Philological Society, 1946, pp. 1-30; "Some Dravidian Words in Sanskrit," ibid, 1945, pp. 79–120; Sanskrit Language, 2nd edition, London, 1965, pp. 372–388.
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