A Sign That Shows Its Own Analysis

The Brahmi mark for this vowel combines the element used for the e vowels with the element used for the long a, so the sign written on the page is an assembly of the parts the phoneticians said the sound was made of. Indian phonetics described o as the coming together of a and u, and the writing follows the description rather than treating the sound as a single unanalysed thing needing a single arbitrary shape. Very few writing systems do anything of the kind, and where it happens it is almost always because the script was designed by people who had already analysed the sounds.

That is the situation Brahmi is in. Whatever the ultimate source of its letter shapes, and epigraphists have argued about that for the better part of two centuries, the arrangement and the internal logic of the inventory follow the Indian analysis of speech rather than the order of any alphabet received from outside. The vowel series is the clearest place to see it: pairs of short and long, then the compound vowels written as compounds, then the consonants running from the back of the mouth to the front. The shapes may be borrowed and the system is not, and keeping those two questions apart is the beginning of reading the argument about the script's origin honestly.