The Relative, and the Sentence Built From It

The Sanskrit relative pronoun begins with this letter, and it works as one half of a matched pair. A relative clause opens with a form of this stem and the main clause answers it with the corresponding form of the demonstrative stem beginning with the dental stop, so a Sanskrit sentence of any complexity is built as a correlation: which man, that man; where, there; when, then. The construction is the backbone of the language's syntax and it survives into the modern Indo-Aryan languages largely intact.

The same stem supplies the conjunctions for that, because, if and as, since a subordinate clause of almost any kind is introduced by one of its forms. Between the relative and the conjunctions the letter is among the most frequent word-initial consonants in the language, and it is one of the first a reader of inscriptions learns to recognise.

The letter is also the semivowel that the vowel i turns into whenever a dissimilar vowel follows it, which is one of the two or three most frequently applied rules in Sanskrit junction. So a reader meets it not only where a word genuinely begins with it but wherever a word ending in i has run into a following vowel and been rewritten. Undoing that is part of reading any continuous text in the script.