Devanagari Va व

Va is the twenty-ninth consonant of the varnamala, the last of the four semivowels, and the partner of the labial vowel u. Its pronunciation across the subcontinent ranges between a sound made with the lower lip against the upper teeth and one made with both lips, closer to an English w, and the two are not distinguished either in the script or in the classical phonetic descriptions, which treat it as a single labial semivowel. Which realisation a speaker uses depends on region and on the neighbouring sounds, and neither is more correct than the other by the tradition's own account. Its written form is close to that of the voiced labial stop, which is why manuscripts confuse the two and why critical editions have to decide between them on grounds of sense.

Under the sandhi rules the vowel u becomes this letter whenever a dissimilar vowel follows, exactly as i becomes the palatal semivowel, so a written text carries it at joins where the separated words had a vowel. That conversion is one of the most frequently applied rules in the language and is among the first a learner has to be able to reverse. The variation between the two realisations is not random, and speakers follow regular habits about where each is used, but those habits differ from region to region and neither the script nor the classical phonetic descriptions record them. The consequence is that this is one of the few things about reading Devanagari that has to be learned by ear rather than read off the page.

Read as a group, the four semivowels are the clearest demonstration that the varnamala is an analysis rather than a list. The grammarians identified four vowels, i, vocalic r, vocalic l and u, and observed that each has a consonantal counterpart made at the same place; they then placed those four counterparts together in the table, in the order of the vowels they answer to, between the stops and the sibilants. The class name they gave them, antahstha or standing between, states the analysis in a word. The rules that convert each vowel into its own semivowel before a dissimilar vowel follow directly, and so does the reverse process by which a semivowel becomes a vowel in certain grammatical formations.

Nothing about this is inherited from an older alphabet: it is a description of Sanskrit arrived at by examining Sanskrit. That is the difference between the varnamala and the Greek, Hebrew and Roman series covered elsewhere in this atlas, whose letters sit in an order transmitted from Phoenician and whose names are Semitic words for ox, house and camel. This atlas records for each semivowel its place, its articulation, and the vowel it answers to, and does not assign any of them a numerical or symbolic value, because the tradition does not assign one.