Iri in the Scribal Tradition

Iri governs the two vowel marks that do the most grammatical work in the language of the Guru Granth Sahib. The short i and the long ee are the endings that distinguish case and number in the older register the scripture uses, and they appear on the great majority of its nouns and verbs. Because the short i is written before its letter and the long ee after, a scribe copying at speed has to place two marks on opposite sides of the same stem, and the manuscripts show that this is where copying errors cluster. Sikh textual scholarship has paid close attention to those endings, since a difference of one vowel mark can turn a noun from singular to plural or shift a verb between persons, and the comparison of early manuscript volumes has depended on tracking them.

The endings are also the reason the scripture cannot be read aloud correctly from modern Punjabi habits alone, since present-day speech has dropped many of them, and a reciter who ignores what is written flattens distinctions the text is making. The tradition therefore teaches reading the scripture as a separate skill from ordinary literacy, and the marks that Iri carries are a large part of what has to be learned. The same endings are the reason Gurmukhi dictionaries of the scriptural language exist as a separate genre from Punjabi dictionaries, since a form that is a live inflection in the text is not a word in the modern language at all.