extra letters in telugu????

Aravinda Pillalamarri (ap191@columbia.edu)
Fri, 12 Jan 1996 11:28:21 -0500 (EST)

at last I went to the Bridgewater temple for the Tiruppavai recital. Now
I know why I got so few (exactly 0) responses to my previous posting,
there was no one else there. It is too bad, and I wish I had gone at the
beginning of dhanurmAsam so that I could have gone more than once. At
least I did hear about it in time. Well while I was having the prasadam
(kichadi) I forgot myself and commented how delicious it was, and the
priest said, "prasAdam kadA...." and indicated with his hands that once it
was offerred all the taste came from "there"... so admonsihed, I will not
"review" the Tiruppavai recital. But I do wish I did not wait till the
end of the month to go there.

The priests seemed pretty happy to have some one other than themselves
singing, and came to give me the Tiruppavai, asking me which language.
Well, I had brought along my own ascii version, downloaded from the net.
Still, I accepted the telugu text he offered me. Whe I tried to read it,
though, there seemed to be some extra letters. I should have asked them
about it inthe temple, but for some reason it slipped my mind after the
puja was done. I don't know if these were tamizh letters slipped in when
telugu equivalent was lacking? Are there more telugu letters than I
learned (and yes I learned all the ru and lu, etc.) they did not look
like the symbols used when sanskrit texts are written in telugu script.
what were they???? any ideas???

-- Aravinda

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