Brahmi Pha 𑀨

The aspirated labial is not a common sound, but one of the words it begins is among the most consequential in Indian religious vocabulary: the word for fruit, used from early on for the result or consequence of an action. The doctrine of action and its consequence, which runs through Hindu, Buddhist and Jain thought alike, is stated in terms of that word, and the technical literature of every one of those traditions uses it constantly. A term for the ripening of a result is built on the same root.

Beyond that family the letter is relatively rare. Aspirated labials are less frequent than their unaspirated partners at every stage of the language, and a text of moderate length may not need the sign at all, which puts it among the less well attested letters in the early inscriptions. It keeps its place regardless, second in the labial class, because the position follows from the analysis rather than from the count.

The sound is not the f of English, which classical Sanskrit does not have. Several of the northern descendant scripts later took this letter and added a subscript dot to write the f that arrived with Persian and Arabic vocabulary, filing a new sound under an existing letter rather than extending the order. Brahmi itself has no such marks and no such sound.

The dotted letters of the later northern scripts are worth understanding as a system, because they show how a fixed alphabet absorbs new sounds. Persian and Arabic vocabulary entered the northern Indian languages in quantity from the medieval period onward and brought sounds the inherited inventory had no letters for: a labiodental fricative, two velar fricatives, a uvular stop, a voiced sibilant. Rather than adding letters to the order, the scripts took the nearest existing sign and put a dot beneath it.

That solution has a specific virtue. The order of letters was a memorised object recited in a fixed sequence, and adding to it would have meant every reciter learning a longer list. A dotted variant is filed under its base letter, so the sequence is unchanged and the recitation still works. It is the same instinct that put the retroflex lateral at the end of the Brahmi consonants rather than among the laterals, and that put the three Tamil additions after everything else.

None of this belongs to Brahmi, and it is worth being clear about that, because a reader who knows a modern Indic alphabet may reasonably assume its refinements go back to the parent. The dotted letters, the explicit vowel canceller and most of the standardised conjunct forms are all later developments.