O in the Language of the Edicts

Middle Indo-Aryan is generous with this vowel. The older au largely fell together with it, several inherited combinations resolved into it, and the Prakrit of the Ashokan edicts uses it constantly, so it is among the vowels a reader of the earliest Brahmi meets most often. In Sanskrit it is the first strengthening grade of u, standing to that vowel as e stands to i, and it is the outcome of a and u meeting at a junction, so it can mark a seam between two words as readily as it can belong to one.

The vowel is always long in Sanskrit and always heavy in metre, with no short counterpart in the classical language, and that shortage is one of the two places where the inherited vowel series does not fit a Dravidian language. Tamil contrasts a short o with a long one in ordinary words, so the southern use of the script had to provide for a distinction the northern one had never needed. It is a small thing beside the three consonants Tamil-Brahmi added outright, but it belongs to the same story: an inventory worked out for one family of languages being fitted, piece by piece, to another. In Sanskrit derivation the vowel appears wherever a suffix calls for the strengthened grade of a root containing u.