I: The Palatal Vowel and Its Backward-Leaning Sign

Short i is the third letter of the varnamala and the second of the three simple vowels that Panini's Shivasutras name in their opening line. The Sanskrit phoneticians class it as palatal, talavya, because it is formed with the body of the tongue raised towards the hard palate, and their scheme places it in the same articulatory family as the palatal consonants ca, cha, ja, jha and na, a grouping that a modern phonetic description would also recognise. That correspondence is not accidental: the whole varnamala is arranged by place of articulation, and the vowels are slotted into the same series as the consonants made at the same point in the mouth.

The vowel sign for short i is the one feature of Devanagari that most often surprises a reader coming from a European script. It is written as a hook that curves over the top of the consonant and comes down on its left, even though the vowel is pronounced after the consonant, not before it. The sign is a unit with the consonant and is read as following it; the visual order simply does not match the spoken order in this one case, and its long counterpart mirrors the same hook to the right. The independent letter, the form shown on this page, appears only where a word begins with the vowel or where it follows another vowel across a join. Its shape descends through the Nagari hands from a Brahmi letter of the same value.