Long I in the Shape of Words

Long i is one of the busiest endings in Sanskrit. It forms feminine stems from a large class of masculines, so the sign appears at the end of an enormous number of words naming women, goddesses, rivers and abstractions of feminine gender, and it is the ending of a set of verbal and nominal derivatives besides. Because it sits at the end of the word it is normally written as a mark on the last consonant rather than as an independent letter, and the independent form is confined to the small number of words that open with the vowel.

Length here is not a shade of pronunciation but the difference between two words. A short i and a long i at the end of a stem can put a word in two different declensions with two different sets of endings, and a reader who misreads the mark misreads the grammar of the sentence. That is why the two marks are held apart in the inscriptions even where the cutting is rapid, and why editors of Brahmi texts note the distinction carefully in their transcriptions. In the Prakrit of the edicts the same distinction is alive, since Middle Indo-Aryan kept vowel quantity even as it simplified a good deal else, and the scribes of the Mauryan chancery had every reason to keep the two signs separate.