E: A Vowel That Is Always Long

E is the eleventh letter of the varnamala and the first of the four the grammarians call sandhyakshara, the sounds formed by combination. Historically it is the outcome of a and i coming together, and Sanskrit treats it as exactly that: it is always long, it has no short partner anywhere in the series, and it counts as a heavy syllable in every metre, even though it is written with a single letter and a single vowel sign.

A learner used to European alphabets, where e is an ordinary short vowel, has to unlearn that expectation before reading Sanskrit metre correctly. The vowel sign is a slanted stroke placed above the headline of the consonant it follows. Devanagari uses the space above the line as freely as the space beside and below it, and the headline running along the top of a word is what makes those upper marks legible as attachments rather than as free-floating strokes. The independent letter shown on this page is used where a word opens with the vowel or where it follows another vowel across a join. The rule that produces e from a and i is not a historical curiosity but an operating part of the grammar. Sanskrit applies sandhi, the euphonic combination of adjacent sounds, across word boundaries as well as inside words, and it applies it in writing, so a recited or manuscript text shows e wherever a word ending in a met a word beginning with i. Reading such a text back into its constituent words is a skill taught alongside the alphabet.