Ii in the Names of the Tradition

The grammatical fact that long ii forms feminine stems has a consequence that runs through the whole religious vocabulary of Sanskrit: an enormous proportion of the names by which goddesses are addressed end in this vowel, as do the abstract nouns for qualities and powers treated as feminine. That is a fact about the language rather than about the letter, but it is the reason the sign appears so often in liturgical and devotional text, and it is worth stating plainly because the coincidence of a grammatical ending with a devotional register is easy to mistake for a property of the sound itself. In recitation, the length of ii is held and trained, since the classical metres are quantitative and a long vowel makes its syllable heavy.

The Vedic schools developed methods of recitation that repeat and permute the words of a text precisely so that vowel lengths and accents cannot drift across generations of oral transmission, and vowel length is one of the features those methods were designed to protect. In the Tantric reading of the alphabet, long ii belongs with the other vowels to the class the traditions treat as prior to the consonants, and the fifty-letter garland of which it is a member is understood as a whole rather than as a set of independent signs. Individual correspondences differ between schools, and this atlas records the letter's place in the series without adopting any one school's further attributions.