Alphabet Letters
Brahmi Vocalic Ll 𑀎
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
Vocalic Ll is the long syllabic l, and it is the one letter in the Brahmi vowel series with no attested word behind it. The sound does not occur in Sanskrit, and the letter exists because the vowels are organised in short and long pairs and the tradition preferred a complete table to an honest gap. It is written in the alphabet, taught in the order and used nowhere else. Its presence says something about how these scripts were transmitted: the order of letters was itself a memorised object, recited and copied whole, and a place in that order did not depend on there being a word in the language that needed the sign. The scripts descended from Brahmi carry the letter forward into their own alphabets for the same reason, and it is still recited in the order today.
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. Attributions
Associated SoundA long syllabic l. The sound does not occur in any attested Sanskrit word, and the letter completes the pattern of short and long that governs the rest of the vowels 2Tradition: Indian epigraphy 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 the vowel it writes, 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 long syllabic l; tenth letter of the Brahmi order 3Tradition: Modern scholarly naming of the Brahmi letters 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 PositionTenth letter of the Brahmi order and the long partner of the ninth vowel 2Tradition: Indian epigraphy How the Letter JoinsAn independent vowel letter takes no attachment. After a consonant the same vowel is written not with this letter but as a mark added to the consonant sign 1Tradition: Comparative writing systems Attestation
Meaning in the Attesting SourceThe Middle Indo-Aryan of the Ashokan edicts had no such sound, so the letter belongs to the Brahmi later adapted for writing Sanskrit rather than to the language of the earliest inscriptions 2Tradition: Indian epigraphy Transmission
Manuscript TraditionAttested from the Asokan rock and pillar edicts of the third century BCE, the earliest substantial Brahmi corpus. 2 Learn More
A Place in the Table With Nothing in It
The long syllabic l is the one letter in the Brahmi vowel series with no word in the language behind it. Sanskrit does not use the sound. It appears in the grammatical literature in artificial forms constructed to complete a paradigm, and Whitney's grammar says as much plainly: the vowel occurs only in the grammarians' own made examples. The letter exists because the vowels are organised in short and long pairs, and the tradition preferred a table complete in its pattern to a table with an honest gap in it.
Stated that way it sounds like a flaw, and it is worth resisting that reading. The table is a piece of analysis before it is a list of signs, and the analysis is that Indian phonetics classified sounds by independent features rather than as a list of individual items. Place, quantity and manner are treated as varying independently, and a system built that way generates cells that the language happens not to fill, in the same way that a well-made chemical table has boxes waiting for elements nobody has yet made. The tradition kept the empty cell and marked it rather than quietly closing the table around it, which is the more informative choice and the one a modern reader can still learn from.
Recited, Copied and Encoded
This letter has been carried forward for two thousand years by recitation. The alphabet was a memorised object taught in a fixed order, and the order was the thing being transmitted, so a sign with nothing to spell was preserved as reliably as the commonest consonant in the language. Every script descended from Brahmi has it in tenth place, including scripts developed for languages that have no syllabic vowels of any kind and could never have had a use for it.
Modern typography and modern encoding inherited the same commitment. Printed alphabet charts across South Asia show the letter; type foundries cut it; and when Brahmi itself was added to the Unicode Standard the letter was encoded with the rest of the vowel series rather than omitted as unused. That is the correct decision for a standard whose job is to represent what is written rather than to judge what is worth writing, and it means the digital record of the script reproduces the shape of the tradition, empty cell included. A reader who meets the letter in a chart and wonders what word uses it has found something real about how the alphabet was made, which is more than most letters in most alphabets can offer.
There is one practical consequence worth naming. Because the letter is never used, its shape in any given script rests on a very thin body of evidence: chart entries, grammatical texts and type specimens rather than running text. Where a palaeographer can trace a common letter through hundreds of dated inscriptions, this one has to be placed by inference from its neighbours in the same charts. So the sign is perfectly preserved as a position in a list and rather poorly attested as a written form, which are two different kinds of survival.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Derived from This
Devanagari Vocalic Ll 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.
Ranjana Vocalic Ll continues the sign Brahmi Vocalic Ll 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
Quantity partners in name more than in use. The short syllabic l is confined to the forms of a single root and the long one has no attested word behind it at all.
Quantity partners in name more than in use. Vocalic Ll is the long counterpart of Vocalic L, and neither has much attested use outside the completeness of the vowel table.
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