I in Combination, and in the Traditions That Count the Letters

Short i is one of the vowels that changes most under the rules of sandhi, and knowing what it becomes when it meets another vowel is part of reading Sanskrit at all. Before a dissimilar vowel it turns into the semivowel ya, so that a word ending in i and a word beginning with a are written and recited as a single run in which the vowel has become a consonant; before another i it lengthens instead. Panini states these changes as rules rather than as lists, and the abbreviations that make the rules short are built out of the Shivasutras in which i appears at the head.

In the Tantric arrangement of the alphabet as a garland of matrika, the short and long vowels stand as a class before the consonants and are the group most often described as the sounds of the power rather than of its expression. The correspondences drawn between individual vowels and particular principles vary between schools and between texts, and the scholarly treatments of the material, Andre Padoux's among them, are careful to present those correspondences as the positions of particular traditions rather than as a single system. This atlas follows that caution: what is recorded here for i is its place in the varnamala, its articulation and its behaviour in the language, and its membership of the fifty-letter series that the Tantric traditions treat as a whole. Where a school assigns it a further meaning, that assignment belongs to the school.