Aim entered common use as Sarasvati's seed syllable within the Tantric period, from roughly the eighth century CE onward, well after the goddess herself, who begins in the Rig Veda as a river and only later, over the first millennium CE, is reidentified as the goddess of speech, learning and the arts once the river she was named for had dried and moved. The compendia that fix aim to her and the exercises attached to it, including the custom of writing a child's first letters in rice or sand while the mantra is recited at Vasant Panchami, belong to the medieval Tantric and Puranic literature, so the mantra is considerably younger than the goddess and reflects a settled rather than an originating stage of her cult. Transmission has followed the pattern of most goddess bijas aimed at a general audience rather than an initiate: teachers, students and musicians recite it without formal initiation, in contrast to bijas embedded in more restricted Shakta sadhana.
The grammatical form is not seriously contested, sarasvatyai is the correct feminine dative for homage to Sarasvati, but scholars of Tantra do dispute the seed syllable's origin. One line derives aim from a contraction associated with buddhi, intellect, making it an etymologically motivated seed rather than an arbitrary sound. The more common Tantric position denies that bijas have etymologies at all and treats aim as a primary sound assigned to Sarasvati by revelation within the Tantric schema, so that any derivation offered afterward is explanatory rather than causal, a difference that matters to practitioners because it decides whether the sound can be reasoned about or only received.