Alphabet Letters
Siddham Vocalic L 𑖈
Siddham Letters
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Origin The Siddhamatrka hand from which Siddham takes its form grows out of the late Brahmi of the Gupta period and is current in Indian inscriptions and manuscripts from about the sixth century CE.
Vocalic L is the ninth letter of the Siddham order, a dental l carrying a syllable on its own in the way the vocalic r does. In practice it is confined to forms built on a single verbal root, which makes it one of the rarest letters of the syllabary in running text. Its place in the table is structural: the phoneticians who set the order paired every vowel quality with a long counterpart and put the two liquid vowels together after the simple ones, and Siddham reproduces the arrangement without alteration. A syllabary recited as a whole keeps letters a scribe may never need, because what is recited is the order itself.
Facts
Origins
Origin PeriodThe Siddhamatrka hand from which Siddham takes its form grows out of the late Brahmi of the Gupta period and is current in Indian inscriptions and manuscripts from about the sixth century CE. 3Tradition: Indian epigraphy Place of OriginNorthern India 3Tradition: Indian epigraphy Origin of the NameNamed by its own sound. Siddham letter names are the sound itself, as in the other Brahmic syllabaries, rather than borrowed words as in the Greek and Semitic alphabets. 1Tradition: Sanskrit phonetics of the grammarians Sense of the Namethe vocalic l; the ninth letter 4Tradition: The Siddham syllabary in its traditional order Identity
Script TypeIndependent vowel letter of a Brahmi-derived abugida, written where a word begins with the vowel; a dependent sign is used where it follows a consonant 1 PositionNinth letter of the Siddham order, the vocalic l 1Tradition: Sanskrit phonetics of the grammarians Attributions
Associated SoundA vocalic l, dental, carrying a syllable on its own; confined in practice to forms built on one verbal root 2Tradition: Sanskrit phonetics of the grammarians Attestation
Meaning in the Attesting SourcePreserved in East Asia after the script had ceased to be written in India, and studied in Japan as shittan, the discipline of Sanskrit letter study transmitted through Chinese Buddhist translation. 5Tradition: East Asian esoteric Buddhism Learn More
Vocalic L: The Siddham Letter
The vocalic l is the rarest of the four liquid vowels and one of the rarest letters in the whole table. In classical Sanskrit it is effectively confined to the forms of a single verbal root and its derivatives, which means a reader can work through a substantial library without meeting it outside a letter chart. Its dependent form, like the other liquid vowels, is written beneath the consonant.
The Indian analysis nonetheless treats it as a full member of the vowel system, on the same footing as a, i and u. The reasoning is structural. The phoneticians recognised that r and l behave alike, that both can carry a syllable, and that a description of the sound inventory admitting one and excluding the other would be inconsistent with itself. Consistency of that kind mattered more to them than the count of words affected, and the table records the decision.
It is worth noticing what that implies about the object being transmitted. A syllabary containing a letter for a sound found in one root is not a practical inventory of what has to be written. It is a model of the sound system, in which the letters are the elements of an analysis. Siddham inherited the model whole, and the traditions that carried the script east preserved it in that form rather than reducing it to whatever their own use required.
Palm Leaf, Paper and the Shape of a Written Line
Siddham was written on palm leaf in India and on paper in China and Japan, and the difference shows in the letters. A palm leaf is cut into a long narrow strip and written with a stylus or a reed, and the line of writing runs the length of it in a shallow band, so the script has to stay compact from top to bottom. The Brahmic scripts are built for exactly that. The vowel marks are small, they sit close to the letter, and a cluster of consonants stacks rather than spreading sideways.
Paper removed the constraint and the brush changed the stroke. A script drawn with a brush acquires modulation, thick where the brush presses and thin where it lifts, and the East Asian Siddham hands are recognisably brush hands in a way the Indian ones are not. The same letter written with a stylus on a leaf and with a brush on paper is the same letter and does not look the same, which is one of the reasons a palaeographer can place a page at all.
The oldest witnesses of the script survive because of this dependence on material. The temple of Horyuji in Nara holds palm-leaf manuscripts in Siddham that have long been described as among the oldest surviving Sanskrit manuscripts anywhere, preserved not in the country that produced them but in the one that received them, because the climate and the institutions there happened to be kinder to a leaf than the ones the leaf came from.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Belongs to Tradition
Shingon writes Sanskrit in Siddham and has done since the school was founded, keeping the script in use in Japan long after it had ceased to be written in India. The letters are studied as a set under the name shittan, and the contemplative practices attached to particular syllables are transmitted by initiation.
Tendai, the other Japanese school carrying an esoteric transmission, keeps the same letters in liturgical and inscriptional use. Siddham on a Japanese grave marker or a ritual implement may belong to either school, and the letters themselves are common to both.
Derived From
Siddham continues the Brahmi order letter for letter. The descent runs through the late Brahmi of the Gupta period and the Siddhamatrka hand that grows out of it, so this is a lineage rather than a direct copy of the older shape.
Originates in Language
The letter is named by its own Sanskrit sound and holds the place the Sanskrit phoneticians gave that sound in their analysis. Siddham was made to write this language, and the East Asian schools that preserved the script preserved it as a way of writing Sanskrit rather than adapting it to a local tongue.
Related To
The same letter of the same order in Devanagari. The two scripts are separate descendants of the same late Brahmi stock rather than one being taken from the other, which is why the sound value and the position agree while the shapes do not.
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