Devanagari Vocalic Ll ॡ

Long vocalic l is the tenth letter of the varnamala and the emptiest place in the whole series. Its short partner is already confined to forms of a single verbal root. The long form does not occur in any attested Sanskrit word at all. It is in the alphabet because the pattern that governs every other vowel requires a long partner for every short one, and the grammarians carried the pattern through to its conclusion rather than stopping where the vocabulary stopped. Whitney's grammar states the position without hedging, noting that the sound is not found in the language.

Recording that plainly is more useful than a description that implies otherwise, and this atlas does not assert a use, a value or a meaning for the letter, because none is attested. What can be said is what the letter is for. The varnamala is a phonetic analysis presented as an ordered table, and a table of that kind is judged partly on whether it is complete: if the system distinguishes vowels by quality and by length, and if a liquid can be a vowel, then the long form of every vocalic liquid has a determinate place whether or not anyone ever pronounced one in a word. The Sanskrit phonetic tradition was systematic in a way that has been recognised since Europeans first encountered it, and this letter is a small monument to that systematicity.

Because the letter has a place in the canonical order, it has continued to be provided for at every stage of the technology used to write Sanskrit. Devanagari typefaces cut for scholarly printing carried it; so do the digital fonts that replaced them. The Unicode Standard encodes it as a distinct character with its own codepoint, and encodes the matching vowel sign separately, so that a text can represent a form containing it even though no such form is known to occur. That is the correct decision for a character encoding, whose job is to represent the writing system rather than to audit the vocabulary, and it is the same reasoning the grammarians applied.

The letter also matters to the count. The Tantric traditions that treat the alphabet as a garland of matrika generally reckon fifty letters, and reaching fifty requires including all four vocalic liquids alongside the two marks for the nasal and the breath. A count that dropped the letters the language does not use would not come to fifty, so the traditions that build on the number depend on exactly this completeness. Andre Padoux's study of the concept of the word in the Hindu Tantras sets out how the schools arrange and interpret the series, and how much their arrangements differ from one another. This atlas records the letter's membership of the series and leaves each school's further attributions to that school.