Alphabet Letters
Brahmi Jha 𑀛
Brahmi Letters
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Origin Mature Brahmi is securely attested in the edicts of Ashoka in the middle of the third century BCE, and the script could be read again only after James Prinsep worked out its values in 1837
Jha is the voiced aspirated palatal, the fourth member of the second class. The sound is rare in the inherited vocabulary of Old Indo-Aryan, and it is a letter a text may run a long way without needing, though it becomes common in the modern languages written with the scripts that descend from Brahmi. Its place in the order is fixed by the pattern rather than by frequency: each of the five classes carries four stops and a nasal, and the table would not teach if a class were short of a member because the sound behind it happened to be uncommon in the language. A table complete in its pattern can be recited, and recitation is how the order of letters was carried for centuries before anyone had reason to write it out as a list.
Facts
Disputed
Origin PeriodMany epigraphists derive Brahmi from a Semitic prototype, most often Aramaic, adapted in the centuries before the Mauryan empire 2Tradition: Indian epigraphy Brahmi's ancestry is disputed among epigraphists. Richard Salomon's Indian Epigraphy (Oxford University Press, 1998) surveys two live positions on the origin of the script attested in the Ashokan inscriptions: one derives Brahmi from a Semitic prototype, most often Aramaic, adapted in the centuries before the Mauryan empire; the other holds that it developed inside India itself. The dispute turns on the corpus, since Brahmi is securely attested only from Ashoka's edicts in the middle of the third century BCE onward, first read again by James Prinsep in 1837, and no earlier specimen on either side is securely dated. Both camps compare Brahmi's letterforms against Aramaic and other Semitic scripts using the same paleographic method, and without an intermediate dated example bridging the gap between any proposed ancestor and the Mauryan era script, neither derivation has been shown to fit the evidence better than the other. Origin PeriodOthers argue for a development inside India, and with no securely dated specimen earlier than the edicts the question stays open 2Tradition: Indian epigraphy Brahmi's ancestry is disputed among epigraphists. Richard Salomon's Indian Epigraphy (Oxford University Press, 1998) surveys two live positions on the origin of the script attested in the Ashokan inscriptions: one derives Brahmi from a Semitic prototype, most often Aramaic, adapted in the centuries before the Mauryan empire; the other holds that it developed inside India itself. The dispute turns on the corpus, since Brahmi is securely attested only from Ashoka's edicts in the middle of the third century BCE onward, first read again by James Prinsep in 1837, and no earlier specimen on either side is securely dated. Both camps compare Brahmi's letterforms against Aramaic and other Semitic scripts using the same paleographic method, and without an intermediate dated example bridging the gap between any proposed ancestor and the Mauryan era script, neither derivation has been shown to fit the evidence better than the other. Origins
Origin PeriodMature Brahmi is securely attested in the edicts of Ashoka in the middle of the third century BCE, and the script could be read again only after James Prinsep worked out its values in 1837 2Tradition: Indian epigraphy Place of OriginThe Indian subcontinent. The Ashokan edicts carry the script from the Gangetic plain across the Deccan to the far south, while the northwest of the same empire wrote in Kharosthi instead 2Tradition: Indian epigraphy Origin of the NameThe letter has no traditional name of its own. It is called by its own sound plus the inherent short a, and the form used here is the name the Unicode Standard gives the character 3Tradition: Modern scholarly naming of the Brahmi letters Sense of the Namethe voiced aspirated palatal; ninth consonant of the Brahmi order 3Tradition: Modern scholarly naming of the Brahmi letters Transmission
Manuscript TraditionAttested from the Asokan rock and pillar edicts of the third century BCE, the earliest substantial Brahmi corpus. 2 Identity
Script TypeAn abugida: every consonant sign carries an inherent short a, which a vowel mark alters and the virama cancels, so the unit written is the syllable rather than the single sound 1Tradition: Comparative writing systems PositionNinth consonant of the Brahmi order and fourth member of the palatal class 2Tradition: Indian epigraphy How the Letter JoinsConsonants that meet with no vowel between them are written as a conjunct, the second stacked beneath or ligatured to the first, rather than as two separate signs 1Tradition: Comparative writing systems Attributions
Associated SoundVoiced aspirated palatal, breathy voiced; the sound is rare in the inherited vocabulary of Old Indo-Aryan 2Tradition: Indian epigraphy Attestation
Meaning in the Attesting SourceThe letter belongs to the received Brahmi order, and the corresponding sign in the scripts descended from Brahmi across South and Southeast Asia goes back to it 2Tradition: Indian epigraphy Learn More
A Letter Whose Time Came Later
The voiced aspirated palatal is close to absent from the inherited vocabulary of Old Indo-Aryan. The few Sanskrit words that carry it are mostly imitative or of uncertain origin, and a classical text can run for a very long stretch without any occasion to write the letter, which puts it among the least attested signs in the whole consonant section of the order.
Its frequency rose sharply in the modern languages. Middle and New Indo-Aryan generated the sound in quantity out of older clusters and out of borrowed vocabulary, so the letter that a Sanskrit text barely needs is entirely ordinary in Hindi, Bengali, Marathi and their neighbours, where it opens common words for a shower of rain, a quarrel and a flag among many others. A sign preserved for two thousand years on the strength of a systematic table turned out to be exactly what the descendants of the language would need, which is not an argument for building tables that way but is a pleasing outcome. It is also a caution against reading letter frequency in one period as a measure of a letter's worth, since the language a script serves does not stay still.
There is a lesson in that for how a script should be judged. An inventory is not a description of what a language needs now but a claim about what it might need, and a table built on features rather than on a word count survives changes in the language that a leaner inventory would not. The Indian phoneticians did not foresee the modern languages, and they did not need to: a system that generates every combination of its features will happen to contain whatever the language later develops, provided the features themselves stay stable.
Pattern Before Frequency
The Brahmi order gives this letter the same standing as the commonest consonant in the language, and the reason is the shape of the analysis rather than any judgment about usefulness. Each of the five classes carries four stops and a nasal because voice and aspiration vary independently at each of five points of articulation, and a table built that way generates every combination whether or not the language fills it. The tradition kept the combinations it did not need, and taught them in sequence with the rest.
That decision has a practical justification and the Indian phoneticians were explicit about it. A complete pattern can be recited, and a recitation is how the order was carried for centuries before anyone had cause to write it out as a list. A table with a gap in it has to be memorised as a list of exceptions, which is a far harder thing to transmit accurately across generations of oral teaching. The five by five arrangement is therefore a mnemonic as much as an analysis, and its regularity is the reason the alphabets of South Asia still agree with one another on the sequence of their letters after two thousand years of independent development in a dozen different regions.
It is worth saying plainly that this is unusual. Most alphabets in the world preserve an order inherited from an earlier script for no reason connected with the sounds, and their sequences cannot be predicted from anything about the language. The Indian order can be reconstructed from the analysis alone by anyone who knows the features, which is why a learner can be taught the principle and then derive the list rather than memorising it as an arbitrary string. That is a different kind of object from an alphabet, and it is the reason the sequence has proved so durable.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Derived from This
Devanagari Jha descends from the Brahmi sign of the same value, through the Gupta and Nagari hands of northern India. The two alphabets align letter for letter because both are laid out in the varnamala order, the arrangement the Sanskrit phoneticians fixed by place of articulation.
The Gurmukhi letter Jhajja continues the sign Brahmi Jha writes in the same place of the inherited series. The descent is not direct: it runs through the Sharada script of the northwest and then the Landa hands of the Punjab, and it is stated from position in the order rather than from shape.
Ranjana Jha continues the sign Brahmi Jha writes in the same place of the inherited varnamala. The descent is not direct: it runs through the Gupta and Siddhamatrka stages of the northern Brahmi line and then the scripts of Nepal, and it is stated from position in the order rather than from shape.
Siddham continues the Brahmi order letter for letter. The descent runs through the late Brahmi of the Gupta period and the Siddhamatrka hand that grows out of it, so this is a lineage rather than a direct copy of the older shape.
Related To
Opposite corners of the palatal class, the second of the five groups of five. One is voiceless and unaspirated, the other voiced and aspirated, and the class holds all four combinations of the two features.
Voicing partners in the palatal class. Both are aspirated stops, and they differ only in voice, which is the second of the two features the table is built on.
Aspiration partners in the palatal class. Both are voiced, and the second is released with the breathy voice that Sanskrit kept where most of its relatives lost it.
The nasal of the palatal class, and the letter that closes the group in the recited order before the table moves on to the next point of articulation.
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