Siddham Uu 𑖅

Long u closes the set of three basic vowel qualities, and the six letters ending with it are the frame the rest of the vowel section is built around. Its dependent sign hangs below the consonant like the short one, with an added turn to separate them, so this is another of the pairs distinguished by a small difference of stroke and another of the places where a hurried copy goes wrong.

In running text the letter is not common. Sanskrit has relatively few roots with an inherent long u, and most occurrences arise from grammatical formation or from the merging of two vowels across a word boundary, where a short u meeting another u yields the long one. That gives the sign the same character as several others in the table: predictable from the grammar, and therefore a place where a scribe who knows the language will be right and one who does not will guess.

Its independent form is correspondingly rare, since few words open on the sound. Like the other independent vowels it is nonetheless taught, written and recited in its place, because what a learner acquires is the table and not a list of what will be needed. The distinction between what a script can write and what a language happens to use is one the Indian tradition kept deliberately visible, and this letter sits on the line between them.

Every vowel in Siddham has two written forms, and the choice between them is mechanical. At the start of a word, where there is no consonant for a mark to attach to, the full independent letter is written. Everywhere else the vowel is a mark added to the consonant or cluster it follows, placed above, below, before or after according to which vowel it is. Nothing about the sound differs between the two forms; what differs is the position in the word.

The system rests on a further convention. A consonant sign is not a bare consonant but a consonant plus short a, so the unmarked shape is already a syllable. Writing any other vowel means replacing that inherent one with a mark, and writing no vowel at all means cancelling it with a stroke. A reader therefore parses a Siddham line into syllables rather than into letters, and a count of the characters on a page is a count of syllables.

This is what makes the script an abugida rather than an alphabet or a syllabary, and it is the property the whole Brahmic family shares. The practical consequence for anyone learning Siddham is that the forty-seven letters are the smaller half of the job. The vowel marks, the cancelling stroke, the nasal and aspiration marks and above all the conjunct forms are the rest of it, and they are where the script actually becomes difficult.