Siddham U 𑖄

The dependent sign for u hangs beneath the consonant, which puts it in competition for space with everything else written below the line. Subjoined consonants in a conjunct go there, the mark for the vocalic r goes there, and a syllable needing both a cluster and this vowel has to accommodate them in one stack. Siddham solves that as the Brahmic scripts generally do, by reshaping the mark or the cluster or both, so the u of a simple syllable and the u of a heavy conjunct may not look the same. A learner acquires the variants as part of learning the conjuncts rather than as part of learning the vowel.

In the vocabulary the sound is common and unremarkable, standing in a long list of ordinary roots and in several frequent endings. What gives the letter a place out of proportion to that is the old analysis of the syllable Om, which takes it to consist of a, u and m. The middle term is this vowel, and the combination of a with u is what the grammarians describe as yielding o, so the analysis is a claim about how sounds are formed before it is a claim about anything else.

The letter also carries an alternate form in the encoding of the script beside its standard one, one of the scribal variants a hand-copied tradition accumulates over a long enough life.

Om written in Siddham is a single joined sign rather than three letters set side by side, and it is probably the most widely reproduced piece of the script anywhere. It is cut in stone, carved in wood, brushed on paper, printed on cloth, worked into metal and set at the head of texts, and it travels well outside the traditions that can read the rest of the syllabary. A great many people who have never seen another Siddham letter have seen this one.

The threefold analysis behind it is old and belongs to the Indian commentarial tradition rather than to the script. It takes the syllable to consist of a, u and m, and reads those three as a set that can be laid against other sets of three, a habit of the commentaries that later traditions extended in a great many directions. The script itself simply writes the syllable, as one sign; the analysis is about the sound.

Its reproduction raises a question this atlas keeps meeting. A sign lifted out of the tradition that uses it, printed on a product or worn as an ornament, is being read by almost nobody who could say what it is. The traditions that keep Siddham in use treat the syllable as belonging to a practice with conditions attached, and describing that is not the same as recommending it. What can be said plainly is what the sign is, where it comes from and what the tradition holds it to be, and that is what is recorded here.