Ya: The Sounds That Stand Between

Ya is the twenty-sixth consonant of the varnamala and the first of the four the grammarians call antahstha, a name meaning standing between. The name records two things at once: the four sit between the stops and the sibilants in the table, and they stand between vowels and consonants in their nature, having the free airflow of a vowel and the consonantal function of occupying a position beside one. Each of the four corresponds to a vowel made at the same place. Ya answers to the palatal i, ra to vocalic r, la to vocalic l, and va to the labial u, so the four semivowels and four of the vowels are the same articulations used in different roles. That correspondence is a working part of the grammar and not an observation added afterwards.

Sanskrit converts each of those vowels into its matching semivowel whenever a dissimilar vowel follows, a rule applied constantly at word joins and inside words, so a reader of a recited or written text meets ya standing where the underlying form had i. Undoing the conversion is part of reading the language, and it is one of the places where the arrangement of the alphabet by articulation directly serves the grammar. The class name antahstha is itself built from ordinary Sanskrit words meaning within and standing, and almost all the grammarians' class names are of that kind, describing either the part of the mouth involved or the way the sounds behave. An alphabet whose class names are descriptions is a different object from one whose letter names are borrowed nouns, and the difference shows in what each can be used for.