Brahmi Ca 𑀘

This letter alone, with its inherent vowel, is the ordinary word for and. It is an enclitic, placed after the item it joins rather than between the items, so a Sanskrit list runs item, item, and rather than item and item, and the particle is written attached to the end of the preceding word. It is among the most frequent words in the language and one of the first a reader of inscriptions learns to recognise, since a single sign standing at the end of a word is unmistakable once known.

The letter has a second life in the history of the language that made it important well beyond Sanskrit. The palatal class arose from an older set of velars that shifted forward before front vowels, and the shift had been complete long before anything in these languages was written. In the later nineteenth century European and Indian scholars working on the comparison of Sanskrit with Greek and Latin realised that the palatals of Sanskrit pointed to front vowels in the parent language that Sanskrit itself had lost, having merged them all into a. That inference, drawn from letters like this one, changed the reconstruction of the whole family, and it was made by reasoning about the Indian writing system rather than by finding any new text.

The transliteration used for this letter in European scholarship is a plain c, which misleads almost every reader who meets it without warning. The sound is not the c of cat and not exactly the ch of church either: the Indian articulation is made further forward, with the body of the tongue against the hard palate rather than the blade against the ridge behind the teeth, and the two are audibly different to a speaker of either language. The convention is a convenience of the roman alphabet and says nothing about the Brahmi letter, which writes one sound with one sign.

The palatal class is well represented in the Prakrit of the Ashokan edicts because Middle Indo-Aryan generated a great many new palatals of its own. A large family of older consonant clusters resolved into palatal sounds as the language changed, so words that show a cluster in Sanskrit routinely show a palatal in the Prakrit of the third century BCE. The letter is therefore common in the earliest surviving material and gives a palaeographer a good supply of dated examples, which is one of the practical reasons the palatal class is easier to trace through the later hands than the classes whose sounds were rarer.

The letter is also one of those whose value shifted in some of the descendant scripts as the languages changed around them. What Brahmi wrote as a palatal stop is pronounced as an affricate across most of the modern Indo-Aryan area and as something closer to a plain sibilant in parts of the east, while the southern scripts kept values nearer the classical description. A single inherited letter can therefore be read four different ways in four modern languages that all descend from the same sign, which is one of the reasons transliteration conventions differ from region to region.