Where the Aspirates Sit in the Family

The five voiced aspirates of Sanskrit, one in each varga, are among the strongest pieces of evidence in the reconstruction of the language family Sanskrit belongs to. The ancestor language is reconstructed with a series of them, and the descendants disposed of the series in different ways: Greek turned them into voiceless aspirates, Latin into fricatives in some positions and stops in others, the Germanic languages into plain voiced stops.

Sanskrit kept them. Because it kept them, it preserves distinctions that the other branches merged, and a word in Sanskrit can therefore show which of two reconstructed ancestors a Greek or Latin word descends from. That is a large part of why Sanskrit was so central to nineteenth-century comparative philology and why the grammars written in that period, Whitney's among them, are careful in their description of exactly these sounds. For a reader of this atlas the point is narrower: the fourth slot in each varga is not an ornament of the table but a real and unusual set of sounds, and the completeness of the Sanskrit stop system is a historical fact about the language rather than a tidiness imposed by its grammarians. Whitney's grammar, from which much of the phonetic description in this atlas is drawn, was written at the height of that comparative work and describes the Sanskrit sounds with an eye to what they show about the wider family. That is worth knowing when reading it, because it explains the weight it gives to features a purely descriptive grammar of the classical language might have passed over quickly.