Where the Long A Does Its Work

Long a is not simply a held version of the short vowel in the grammar; it is a working piece of Sanskrit morphology. It marks the great majority of feminine stems, so the ending distinguishes a masculine noun from its feminine counterpart across the whole vocabulary of the language, and it appears in the endings of the instrumental and the nominative plural of several stem classes. It is also the outcome of two short a vowels meeting at a junction, so a long vowel on the page may be a long vowel in the word or the visible seam between two words that ran together.

The vowel carries a second load in derivation. The grammatical tradition describes a ladder of strengthening applied to a root when a suffix calls for it, and for the a vowel the higher grade is simply the long one, so a form built from a strengthened root shows this vowel where the plain root shows the short one. That is the mechanism behind a large number of Sanskrit nouns built from verbs. Long a is also a prefix in its own right, placed before a verb to turn a motion away into a motion towards, which is why so many words in the religious vocabulary of the subcontinent open with it. All three uses put the vowel at the head of a word, and a word-initial vowel is the one case in which the script has to write the independent letter rather than a mark.