The Series That Made Comparative Philology Possible

The voiced aspirates were the most consequential sounds in Sanskrit for the study of language in Europe. Most of the older Indo-European languages had lost the series, merging it into plain voiced stops or into fricatives, and Sanskrit had kept it. When European scholars began comparing Sanskrit with Greek, Latin and Germanic in the early nineteenth century, the four letters that write these sounds were among the clearest evidence that the resemblance among the languages was systematic rather than accidental, because they showed regular correspondences with quite different sounds in each of the others.

That is a use of the letter its Indian inventors never contemplated, and it is worth keeping the two things apart. To the phoneticians who built the table, the sound is simply the fourth cell of the velar class, voiced and aspirated, and its place is dictated by the arrangement rather than argued for. To a comparative philologist it is a survival. Both readings are correct and they answer different questions. The sound itself is a single articulation released with breathy voice, not a stop followed by a separate h, and the phonetic tradition is explicit on the point, which is why Brahmi writes it with one letter rather than with a cluster of two.