The Commonest Word in Sanskrit Begins Here

This letter alone, with its inherent vowel, is the ordinary word for and. It is an enclitic, placed after the item it joins rather than between the items, so a Sanskrit list runs item, item, and rather than item and item, and the particle is written attached to the end of the preceding word. It is among the most frequent words in the language and one of the first a reader of inscriptions learns to recognise, since a single sign standing at the end of a word is unmistakable once known.

The letter has a second life in the history of the language that made it important well beyond Sanskrit. The palatal class arose from an older set of velars that shifted forward before front vowels, and the shift had been complete long before anything in these languages was written. In the later nineteenth century European and Indian scholars working on the comparison of Sanskrit with Greek and Latin realised that the palatals of Sanskrit pointed to front vowels in the parent language that Sanskrit itself had lost, having merged them all into a. That inference, drawn from letters like this one, changed the reconstruction of the whole family, and it was made by reasoning about the Indian writing system rather than by finding any new text.