Frequent in the Edicts, and Not Quite What It Looks Like

The transliteration used for this letter in European scholarship is a plain c, which misleads almost every reader who meets it without warning. The sound is not the c of cat and not exactly the ch of church either: the Indian articulation is made further forward, with the body of the tongue against the hard palate rather than the blade against the ridge behind the teeth, and the two are audibly different to a speaker of either language. The convention is a convenience of the roman alphabet and says nothing about the Brahmi letter, which writes one sound with one sign.

The palatal class is well represented in the Prakrit of the Ashokan edicts because Middle Indo-Aryan generated a great many new palatals of its own. A large family of older consonant clusters resolved into palatal sounds as the language changed, so words that show a cluster in Sanskrit routinely show a palatal in the Prakrit of the third century BCE. The letter is therefore common in the earliest surviving material and gives a palaeographer a good supply of dated examples, which is one of the practical reasons the palatal class is easier to trace through the later hands than the classes whose sounds were rarer.

The letter is also one of those whose value shifted in some of the descendant scripts as the languages changed around them. What Brahmi wrote as a palatal stop is pronounced as an affricate across most of the modern Indo-Aryan area and as something closer to a plain sibilant in parts of the east, while the southern scripts kept values nearer the classical description. A single inherited letter can therefore be read four different ways in four modern languages that all descend from the same sign, which is one of the reasons transliteration conventions differ from region to region.