What Sanskrit Kept That Its Relatives Lost

The four voiced aspirates in the letter table are one of the strongest pieces of evidence in comparative Indo-European linguistics, and they are there because Sanskrit preserved a set of sounds that almost every related language lost. Greek turned them into voiceless aspirates and then into fricatives. Latin turned them into fricatives at the front of a word and voiced stops elsewhere. Germanic and Slavic merged them with the plain voiced series. Sanskrit kept them distinct, wrote them with letters of their own, and had a grammatical tradition that described them precisely.

That preservation is a large part of why the discovery of Sanskrit by European scholars in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries reorganised the study of language. A language that keeps distinctions its relatives have merged shows what the merged forms came from, and the letter table, being an inventory of the sound system rather than a spelling convention, made the evidence unusually easy to read.

None of that is why the letter is in the Siddham order. The Indian phoneticians classified the sound because it existed in the language they were describing, centuries before anyone had a notion of a language family. But it is why a table compiled for one purpose turned out to be a document of another, and why a script preserved by Japanese monks for liturgical reasons has a place in the history of a European science.