Devanagari I इ

Short i is the third letter of the varnamala and the second of the three simple vowels that Panini's Shivasutras name in their opening line. The Sanskrit phoneticians class it as palatal, talavya, because it is formed with the body of the tongue raised towards the hard palate, and their scheme places it in the same articulatory family as the palatal consonants ca, cha, ja, jha and na, a grouping that a modern phonetic description would also recognise. That correspondence is not accidental: the whole varnamala is arranged by place of articulation, and the vowels are slotted into the same series as the consonants made at the same point in the mouth.

The vowel sign for short i is the one feature of Devanagari that most often surprises a reader coming from a European script. It is written as a hook that curves over the top of the consonant and comes down on its left, even though the vowel is pronounced after the consonant, not before it. The sign is a unit with the consonant and is read as following it; the visual order simply does not match the spoken order in this one case, and its long counterpart mirrors the same hook to the right. The independent letter, the form shown on this page, appears only where a word begins with the vowel or where it follows another vowel across a join. Its shape descends through the Nagari hands from a Brahmi letter of the same value.

Short i is one of the vowels that changes most under the rules of sandhi, and knowing what it becomes when it meets another vowel is part of reading Sanskrit at all. Before a dissimilar vowel it turns into the semivowel ya, so that a word ending in i and a word beginning with a are written and recited as a single run in which the vowel has become a consonant; before another i it lengthens instead. Panini states these changes as rules rather than as lists, and the abbreviations that make the rules short are built out of the Shivasutras in which i appears at the head.

In the Tantric arrangement of the alphabet as a garland of matrika, the short and long vowels stand as a class before the consonants and are the group most often described as the sounds of the power rather than of its expression. The correspondences drawn between individual vowels and particular principles vary between schools and between texts, and the scholarly treatments of the material, Andre Padoux's among them, are careful to present those correspondences as the positions of particular traditions rather than as a single system. This atlas follows that caution: what is recorded here for i is its place in the varnamala, its articulation and its behaviour in the language, and its membership of the fifty-letter series that the Tantric traditions treat as a whole. Where a school assigns it a further meaning, that assignment belongs to the school.