Words That Travelled, and the Letter That Opens Them

The history of these two words is a good illustration of how the vocabulary of the Indian traditions spread and of what happened to the sounds on the way. Neither was translated when Buddhism moved north and east; both were transliterated into the receiving scripts, adapted to the sound systems of the receiving languages, and then inherited by later languages from those adaptations. The word for meditative absorption lost its aspirated dental entirely in Chinese, which has no such sound, and reached Japanese as a single syllable that shares little with the Sanskrit original beyond a line of descent.

The word for order and duty travelled with its own set of adaptations, and it is now naturalised in English with a range of senses that no single Indian tradition would recognise as its own. What this atlas records for the letter is its place and articulation, both attested in the grammatical literature. The word histories are recorded because they are facts about words that begin with the letter, and they are marked as such, not offered as meanings the sign carries. In a script whose letters are named by their own sounds and have no inherited names of the kind Greek and Hebrew letters carry, there is no mechanism by which a word's meaning could attach itself to a letter, and this atlas does not pretend otherwise.