Aira ਅ

Aira is the second letter of the Gurmukhi painti and the middle of its three vowel bearers. It differs from Ura and Iri in a way that matters at the first lesson: written bare it is not silent. Gurmukhi gives every sign an inherent short a, and the bearer is not exempt, so Aira with no vowel mark on it is read as a. The open and diphthongal vowels are then built on that same frame. The vertical stroke called kanna, written after the letter, gives the long aa. Two small strokes above, the dulavan, give ai. One stroke above joined to the kanna, the kanaura, gives au.

Because so many Punjabi words open on an a, Aira is the bearer a reader meets most often, and it is the one that appears in the grammatical particles that hold sentences together. It is also the bearer used when a word must begin with a vowel that has no home elsewhere, which makes it the default of the three. In the recitation of the alphabet the three bearers are read as a group before any consonant, and Aira, having a sound of its own, is the one the group is usually named for. Its written shape is a stem from the headline with an open bowl to its left, near enough to Ura in a hurried hand that separating them cleanly is one of the first things a Gurmukhi teacher corrects.

Aira is central to a feature of the Guru Granth Sahib that surprises readers who come to it from modern Punjabi: its spelling is not modern Punjabi spelling. The scripture preserves an older orthography in which vowel endings are written where present speech has dropped them, and many of those endings are carried on or around Aira. Sikh scholarship treats those endings as grammatical information rather than as decoration, since they mark case and number in the older language, and reciters and scholars read them accordingly. That is one reason the Sikh tradition has resisted modernising the text: an editorial tidy of the vowels would delete meaning, and the volume is in any case treated as a living Guru whose wording is not open to revision.

Aira also sits at the centre of a practical scribal difficulty. Its bare form and its form with the kanna differ by a single stroke, and in a manuscript hand written at speed, with the headline running unbroken across the word, the presence or absence of that stroke is the whole difference between two words. Copyists working on a bir, a complete manuscript volume of the scripture, were expected to work slowly for exactly this reason, and comparison of the surviving early manuscripts turns on such details, since a variant vowel is the kind of evidence that shows which copy descends from which.