Aspiration Written, Never Inferred

A reader of Brahmi is told whether a palatal is aspirated rather than left to work it out. That sounds unremarkable until it is set beside the scripts of western Asia, most of which left a great deal more to the reader, and beside the Brahmi treatment of other features, which is a good deal less generous. The script does not mark the difference between an intervocalic retroflex stop and the flap it weakens to; it does not distinguish a doubled consonant from a single one in every period; and it leaves the reader to supply a good deal of the vowel quantity in worn inscriptions. Aspiration it always writes, because the language turns on it.

Where this letter meets a following consonant with no vowel between, the two are written as a single conjunct. Clusters involving the palatals are common in both Sanskrit and Prakrit, and the combined shapes they produce are among those that changed most as the script passed into its regional descendants, because a ligature has more room to drift than a single letter does. A palaeographer therefore treats conjuncts as a separate body of evidence from the simple letters, and a script can look conservative in its letters and radical in its ligatures at the same time.