Siddham E 𑖊

E is always long in Sanskrit, and the absence of a short partner in the table is a statement about the language rather than a gap in the script. Historically the vowel is what results when a and i combine, and that origin is still visible in the way the language behaves: where a prefix ending in a meets a root beginning in i, the two are written as this single letter, and a reader recovering the parts is undoing the merger every time.

The grammarians describe it as the first strengthening grade of i, the lower of two steps on a ladder that applies right across the verbal and nominal system. That makes the letter structural in a way its frequency alone would not suggest. A great many verb forms and derived nouns are produced by taking a root with i in it and raising the vowel one grade, so the sign records an operation as often as it records a sound.

On the page it behaves like the other vowels: a full letter at the start of a word, and elsewhere a mark added to the consonant it follows. In metre it always counts as heavy, since Sanskrit prosody treats every long vowel that way, and in a tradition that transmitted a great deal of its material in verse the letter is therefore doing metrical work on every line it appears in.

The order of the Siddham letters is not an invention of the script and is a great deal older than it. It comes from the Indian grammatical tradition, whose analysis of the sounds of Sanskrit by point and manner of articulation was already complete and highly refined before any of the surviving Brahmic scripts took the shape they now have. Panini, whose grammar is the central work of that tradition, describes a language rather than a way of writing it, and the phonetic treatises standing beside the grammar set out the classification the letter table simply follows.

That is why the arrangement is unlike an alphabet. The Mediterranean order is inherited and arbitrary, a sequence of letters whose original rationale, if there was one, is lost. The Indian order is a claim: these are the points at which the mouth closes, these are the features that cross them, and here is every combination the two produce. A student reciting it is reciting a theory.

The theory travelled better than the script did. Chinese and Japanese scholars studied the table as an analysis of speech and used it on their own languages, and the standard ordering of the Japanese kana is the visible result, a grid by consonant and vowel with the consonants running in the Sanskrit sequence. Indian phonetics reached Japan as a working tool, carried there by monks who wanted to pronounce a mantra correctly, and stayed as the frame for describing a language it was never designed for.