Long U and the Weight of a Syllable

A syllable containing this vowel is heavy, whatever consonants stand around it, and that fact governs the whole of Sanskrit and Prakrit versification. The classical metres are counted patterns of heavy and light syllables, and a great deal of the poetry the script was later used to record is unreadable as verse unless the two u vowels are held apart. The distinction also separates ordinary words, and it carries grammatical information: long u is the ending of a set of feminine stems and appears in the strong forms of several roots.

The vowel is much less common than its short partner, which is the ordinary pattern for the long members of the vowel pairs, and in the Middle Indo-Aryan of the Ashokan edicts it is rarer still, since Prakrit shortened many inherited long vowels before a consonant cluster. A reader coming to a Brahmi inscription from Sanskrit therefore meets fewer long vowels than expected, and the shortage is a feature of the language rather than a carelessness of the scribe. Editors record what the stone shows rather than what the Sanskrit form would require, and the resulting apparatus is one of the standing sources of evidence for how Middle Indo-Aryan actually sounded in the third century BCE.