Where the Palatals Came From

The palatal class has a history that was worked out in the nineteenth century and that reshaped how the relationship between Sanskrit and the European languages was understood. Sanskrit palatals correspond, in related words across the family, to velars in Greek and Latin, and the correspondence turned out to be conditioned: the ancestor language had velars, and those velars became palatals in Sanskrit when a front vowel followed. Establishing that also explained a puzzle about the vowels, since Sanskrit has a where Greek and Latin have e, o and a in the same words, and the palatalisation shows that the distinction those languages preserve must once have been present in the ancestor of Sanskrit too and was lost afterwards.

The finding is one of the foundations of Indo-European linguistics and is set out in the standard handbooks. For the alphabet, the consequence is that the second varga is a later development in the language even though it holds an early place in the table, which is a reminder that the varnamala orders sounds by how the mouth makes them and not by when they arose. The atlas records the class's articulation and position as attested; the historical account belongs to comparative philology and is cited to that literature rather than asserted as a property of the letter.