Alphabet Letters
Iri ੲ
Gurmukhi Letters
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Iri is the third letter of the Gurmukhi painti and the last of the three vowel bearers. Like Ura it is silent on its own and exists only to hold a vowel sign at the start of a syllable that begins with a vowel. The front vowels are assigned to it, so that i, the long ee and e are written on Iri. Bare Iri does not occur as a word, because a bearer with nothing to bear says nothing. Its shape is the narrowest of the three, two short verticals dropped from the headline, and it is the one beginners most often confuse with the consonant Sassa when writing quickly, which is why Gurmukhi primers usually drill the three bearers as a set before any consonant is introduced.
Facts
Disputed
Origin PeriodHistorians of Indic writing place the letterforms earlier, in the Landa mercantile hands already used across the Punjab 1Tradition: The Gurmukhi script Two reference works give incompatible accounts. The Encyclopaedia of Sikhism (Harbans Singh, editor-in-chief, Punjabi University, Patiala, 1998) carries the Sikh tradition that Guru Angad, the second Guru (1504-1552), devised the script. The World's Writing Systems (Peter T. Daniels and William Bright, eds., Oxford University Press, 1996), surveying the paleography of Indic scripts, holds instead that the letterforms were already in mercantile use in the Punjab as one of the Landa scripts descended from Sharada, and that comparing those existing Landa forms against the Gurmukhi letters attested from Guru Angad's era shows a fixing and standardising of a repertoire already in circulation rather than an invention from nothing. Neither side has displaced the other because the two accounts read different kinds of evidence, a community's own historical memory against a comparative script lineage, and the atlas records both without adjudicating. Origin PeriodSikh tradition credits Guru Angad, the second Guru, with giving the script its settled form in the sixteenth century 3Tradition: The Gurmukhi script Two reference works give incompatible accounts. The Encyclopaedia of Sikhism (Harbans Singh, editor-in-chief, Punjabi University, Patiala, 1998) carries the Sikh tradition that Guru Angad, the second Guru (1504-1552), devised the script. The World's Writing Systems (Peter T. Daniels and William Bright, eds., Oxford University Press, 1996), surveying the paleography of Indic scripts, holds instead that the letterforms were already in mercantile use in the Punjab as one of the Landa scripts descended from Sharada, and that comparing those existing Landa forms against the Gurmukhi letters attested from Guru Angad's era shows a fixing and standardising of a repertoire already in circulation rather than an invention from nothing. Neither side has displaced the other because the two accounts read different kinds of evidence, a community's own historical memory against a comparative script lineage, and the atlas records both without adjudicating. Attributions
Associated SoundNo sound of its own; a vowel bearer carrying the front vowels, i, the long ee and e. 1 Attestation
Meaning in the Attesting SourceCarries the front vowels i with sihari, the long ee with bihari and e with lavan 1Tradition: The Gurmukhi painti Meaning in the Attesting SourceEncoded at U+0A72 GURMUKHI IRI in the Gurmukhi block 4Tradition: The Gurmukhi painti Meaning in the Attesting SourceGurmukhi letters carry no numerical value; the script has its own digits, which are separate signs 4Tradition: The Gurmukhi painti Meaning in the Attesting SourceThe sihari is written to the left of its letter but pronounced after it 1Tradition: The Gurmukhi painti Meaning in the Attesting SourceThird of the painti and the last of the three vowel bearers 1Tradition: The Gurmukhi painti Identity
Script TypeA vowel bearer of the Gurmukhi abugida, one of three: it carries no vowel value of its own, and a dependent vowel sign is written on it to spell a word-initial vowel. 1 PositionThird of the thirty-five letters of the Gurmukhi painti; the last of the three vowel bearers. 1 Origins
Place of OriginThe Punjab, in the Sharada branch of the Brahmic scripts, by way of the Landa mercantile hands 1Tradition: The Gurmukhi script Origin of the NameGurmukhi is read within the tradition as from the mouth of the Guru 2Tradition: The Gurmukhi script Origin of the NameThe name Iri is a mnemonic built from the letter's own vowel, not a word for an object 3Tradition: The Gurmukhi painti Sense of the Nameno sound of its own; the bearer that carries the front vowels i, ee and e 2Tradition: The Gurmukhi script Learn More
Iri: The Gurmukhi Letter
Iri is the third letter of the Gurmukhi painti and the last of its three vowel bearers. Like Ura it is silent standing alone, and its whole function is to hold a vowel mark when a syllable opens with a vowel. The front vowels are assigned to it. The mark called sihari, written before the letter although read after it, gives i. Its long counterpart, bihari, written after, gives ee. A single stroke above, the lavan, gives e. The sihari is worth noting on its own account, because it is written to the left of the letter it belongs to while being pronounced after it, so a reader must take the mark and the letter as one unit rather than reading strictly left to right. That behaviour is inherited from the wider Brahmic family and it is the commonest early stumble in learning the script.
Iri is the narrowest of the three bearers, two short verticals dropped from the headline, and beginners regularly confuse it with the consonant Sassa, which is why primers drill the three bearers together as a block before introducing any consonant at all. Bare Iri does not appear as a word, for the same reason bare Ura does not: there is nothing for a bearer to say until something is written on it. The three bearers are also the clearest illustration of why Gurmukhi is classed as an abugida rather than an alphabet: the system assumes a consonant, and a vowel standing on its own is the exception that needs machinery.
Iri in the Scribal Tradition
Iri governs the two vowel marks that do the most grammatical work in the language of the Guru Granth Sahib. The short i and the long ee are the endings that distinguish case and number in the older register the scripture uses, and they appear on the great majority of its nouns and verbs. Because the short i is written before its letter and the long ee after, a scribe copying at speed has to place two marks on opposite sides of the same stem, and the manuscripts show that this is where copying errors cluster. Sikh textual scholarship has paid close attention to those endings, since a difference of one vowel mark can turn a noun from singular to plural or shift a verb between persons, and the comparison of early manuscript volumes has depended on tracking them.
The endings are also the reason the scripture cannot be read aloud correctly from modern Punjabi habits alone, since present-day speech has dropped many of them, and a reciter who ignores what is written flattens distinctions the text is making. The tradition therefore teaches reading the scripture as a separate skill from ordinary literacy, and the marks that Iri carries are a large part of what has to be learned. The same endings are the reason Gurmukhi dictionaries of the scriptural language exist as a separate genre from Punjabi dictionaries, since a form that is a live inflection in the text is not a word in the modern language at all.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Derived From
The Gurmukhi letter Iri continues the sign Brahmi I writes, through the Sharada script of the northwest and the Landa hands of the Punjab. The parent wrote an independent vowel letter here; Gurmukhi reduced it to a silent bearer that holds a vowel sign, which is a departure of its own.
Related To
Devanagari E answers to the Gurmukhi bearer Iri, whose own description states the front vowels, i, the long ee and e, are assigned to it.
Devanagari I answers to the Gurmukhi bearer Iri, which has no sound of its own and carries the vowel signs instead. Where Devanagari writes an independent letter for each initial vowel, Gurmukhi writes three bearers and distinguishes the vowels by the sign attached to them, so the correspondence is one of function rather than a matched pair of letters.
Iri answers to Devanagari I: Iri is silent on its own, standing in for the front vowels including i, which Devanagari writes as its own independent letter.
Devanagari Ii answers to the Gurmukhi bearer Iri, whose own description states the front vowels, i, the long ee and e, are assigned to it.
Sources
1. The World's Writing Systems
Peter T. Daniels and William Bright (eds.), Oxford University Press, 1996View the Source 2. Historical Dictionary of Sikhism, 3rd edition
Louis E. Fenech and W. H. McLeod, Rowman and Littlefield, 2014View the Source 3. The Encyclopaedia of Sikhism
Harbans Singh (editor-in-chief), Punjabi University, Patiala, 1998View the Source 4. The Unicode Standard
Indian Epigraphy: A Guide to the Study of Inscriptions in Sanskrit, Prakrit, and the Other Indo-Aryan Languages
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