Eelam (, īḻam, , also spelled Eezham, Ilam or Izham in English) is the native Tamil name for the South Asian island now known as Sri Lanka. The exact etymology and the original meaning of the word are not clearly known, and there are number of conflicting theories. The Retroflex approximant ḻ in īḻam is a characteristic phoneme for Dravidian languages, now only retained in the closely related languages Tamil and Malayalam. Conventionally it has been represented in the Latin script with the digraph zh. History The earliest use of the word is found in a Tamil-Brahmi inscription as well as in the Sangam literature. The Tirupparankunram inscription found near Madurai in Tamil Nadu and dated on palaeographical grounds to the 1st century BCE, refers to a person as a householder from Eelam (Eela-kudumpikan). The inscription reads, The Sangam literature Paṭṭiṉappālai, mentions Eelattu-unavu (food from Eelam). One of the prominent Sangam Tamil poets is known as Eelattu Poothanthevanar meaning Poothan-thevan (proper name) hailing from Eelam. (Akanaṉūṟu: 88, 231, 307; Kuṟuntokai: 189, 360, 343; Naṟṟiṇai: 88, 366). The Tamil inscriptions from the Pallava & Chola period dating from 9th century CE link the word with toddy, toddy tapper's quarters (Eelat-cheri), tax on toddy tapping (Eelap-poodchi), a class of toddy tappers (Eelath-chanran). Eelavar is a caste of toddy tappers found in the southern parts of Kerala. Eela-kaasu and Eela-karung-kaasu are refers to coinages found in the Chola inscriptions of Parantaka I. Since the 1980s the words Eelam and Eelavar have been taken up by the Tamil separatist movements. Eelavar now refers to the citizens of the proposed Tamil Eelam, which would have taken up the northern and eastern parts of Sri Lanka. Etymology Sihala>Eelam Late-19th-century linguists took the view that the name Eelam was derived from the Pali (An Indo-Aryan language) form Sihala for Sri Lanka. Robert Caldwell, following Hermann Gundert, cites the word as an example of the omission of initial sibilants in the adoption of Indo-Aryan words into Dravidian languages. Sri Lankan historian Karthigesu Indrapala in his thesis released in 1965 suggested that the people from whose named Eelam is derived were Sinhalese. The earliest occurrence of the name Eelam is in the Brahmi inscriptions of South India in which it occurs as Ila (Eela), the Prakrit form of the Eelam. He derived Eelam from Sinhala as follows; Eelam>Sihala Thomas Burrow, in contrast, argued that the word was likely to