E: The Siddham Letter

E is always long in Sanskrit, and the absence of a short partner in the table is a statement about the language rather than a gap in the script. Historically the vowel is what results when a and i combine, and that origin is still visible in the way the language behaves: where a prefix ending in a meets a root beginning in i, the two are written as this single letter, and a reader recovering the parts is undoing the merger every time.

The grammarians describe it as the first strengthening grade of i, the lower of two steps on a ladder that applies right across the verbal and nominal system. That makes the letter structural in a way its frequency alone would not suggest. A great many verb forms and derived nouns are produced by taking a root with i in it and raising the vowel one grade, so the sign records an operation as often as it records a sound.

On the page it behaves like the other vowels: a full letter at the start of a word, and elsewhere a mark added to the consonant it follows. In metre it always counts as heavy, since Sanskrit prosody treats every long vowel that way, and in a tradition that transmitted a great deal of its material in verse the letter is therefore doing metrical work on every line it appears in.