Om - its origin

[Guest guest]

INDOLOGY, "naga_ganesan <naga_ganesan@h...>"

<naga_ganesan@h...> wrote:

> Note that tamil has a unique letter for Om.

 

This is actually a common understanding but is not, I am afraid,

quite correct. The original 'Om' comes from two grantha characters,

the first being the character for 'o' followed by a character looking

like a small Roman 'o' which does the duty of an anusvara. In

manuscripts, the small 'o' used to be frequently reduced to just a

dot.

 

The Tamil reader naturally considers the 'm' character to be missing

in the traditional emblem for 'Om' since it is easy to miss the dot.

Thus in a hypercorrect way we have the Tamil 'm' inside of the

Tamil 'o'. (Incidentally Tamil 'o' is identical to the Grantha 'o'

except for an extra curlicue which really is a scribal flourish and

the Tamil 'm' is an altogether different character. It does not look

anything like Grantha 'm'. It is identical graphically to the

Malayalam 'th'). This has given rise to the impression that Tamil has

a special character for Om. Nowadays in print media, 'om' is written

is written in Tamil as two characters viz., an 'o' followed by

an 'm'.

 

In time, it has become traditional to paint a Murugan and his peacock

inside the large hook of the Tamil 'o', thus Murugan becomes the

indweller of the 'pranava', so to speak. Likewise, the grantha 'Om'

symbol written by traditional people at the top margin of ola and so

forth, has also been used by people using the Tamil script. In time

the dot was omitted from the 'Om' and people started considering this

as a special symbol to be written at the beginning of accounts or any

piece of writing etc - presumably for Ganesa for purposes of obstacle

removal (in fact it is called a 'piLLaiyAr cuzi', or the Ganesa

curlicue). This symbol is actually nothing but a cursive

Grantha 'o'.

 

The same mythology exists for the Tamil symbol for 'zrI'. It is

actually nothing but the Grantha representation for 'zrI' but with a

cursive joining of all the radicals involved so it looks like a

single symbol. In Grantha actually, the half 'r' appears below the

middle register which is the place for the 'z' and the vowel mark

appears above the middle register and a little to its right. But the

idea that the Tamil 'zrI' is a unique character is so strong that

even Tamil Internet encoding (TSCII) supports it.

 

Hope this helps,

 

Lakshmi Srinivas

[Guest guest]

INDOLOGY, "lsrinivas <lsrinivas>" <lsrinivas>

wrote:

> INDOLOGY, "naga_ganesan <naga_ganesan@h...>"

> <naga_ganesan@h...> wrote:

> > Note that tamil has a unique letter for Om.

>

> This is actually a common understanding but is not, I am afraid,

> quite correct. The original 'Om' comes from two grantha characters,

> the first being the character for 'o' followed by a character looking

> like a small Roman 'o' which does the duty of an anusvara. In

> manuscripts, the small 'o' used to be frequently reduced to just a

> dot.

>

 

The shadkoNa yantra with the grantha Om:

http://murugan.org/bhakti.htm

 

Thanks,

N. Ganesan