BEI 32 (2014): 101-131 Jean-Luc CHEVILLARD On Tamil “Secondary Phones” (Cārpeḻuttu-s) –1: the aikārak kuṟukkam “reduced ai” * 0. Introduction After a long preliminary exposition, this article will examine, as its core topic, the strategy used by traditional Tamil grammarians for dealing with the ninth vowel of standard (ancient) Tamil, which is usually represented by “ai” in transliteration. That vowel is initially presented as being a long vowel, possessing a duration of 2 māttirai (Skt. mātrā), but verifying the “real” existence of that long vowel inside native Tamil words turns out to be problematic, while, on the other hand, a “variant” of “ai”, which is discussed in grammatical literature, and is referred to as aikārak kuṟukkam “reduced ai” turns out to be more “real” than its elusive full counterpart. The duration of the “reduced ai” can be 1½ māttirai or 1 māttirai, depending normally on whether it is in the first syllable of a word or in another * This article is the reworked and expanded form of an oral presentation, at a workshop (“The Indian Traditions of Language Studies”) during the 11th ICHoLS conference (Potsdam 2008). That presentation had as original title, “On the relative chronology of Tamil grammarians (1): The case of aikārakkuṟukkam” and might be now briefly characterized, anachronistically, as an explicitation/development of the footnote 44, in Chevillard [2013 : 257], because it appears, in retrospect, as part of an interconnected network of articles pertaining to Tamil metrics. Working on it has been the occasion for me to exchange with several colleagues, starting with some of the participants in the workshop in 2008, to whom I express here my thanks. One of the questions discussed, for instance with Ashok Aklujkar, was how independant the grammatical (and phonetic) reflexions can be from parameters related to writing, and how the Tamil śāstric tradition might be different from the Sanskrit one, in that respect. I am also grateful to the participants in the NETamil project, Giovanni Ciotti, Victor D’Avella, Eva Wilden, and others, for reading with me, in recent years, several Tamil grammatical texts, in Pondicherry (in the EFEO center) and in Hamburg (in the CSMC), giving me the opportunity to see them through somebody else’s eyes. Concerning this article, my special thanks are due to Victor D’Avella, Dominic Goodall, Eva Wilden and Émilie Aussant for their suggestions, while reading a pre-final version of this paper.