Siddham Aa 𑖁

The independent long a is needed only at the head of a word, and in Sanskrit that position is filled more often by rule than by the shape of any root. A short a ending one word and meeting a short or long a beginning the next merge into a single long vowel, so a great many long a sounds on a page are the seam between two words rather than a feature of either. Written in Siddham the seam is invisible: what stands there is one letter, and separating it back into its parts is a judgement the reader makes from the grammar.

After a consonant the length is not a letter at all but an added stroke, and the economy is worth stating plainly, because it is the whole design of an abugida. Forty-seven letters and a small set of marks generate every syllable of the language. A reader who knows the consonant and knows the mark knows the syllable, and no separate character is needed for the hundreds of combinations that result.

The letter carries a further weight from the shape of the vocabulary. Sanskrit forms most of its feminine nouns and adjectives with a final long a, so the goddess names, a great many abstract nouns and a long list of doctrinal terms of feminine gender all close on this vowel. A page of devotional or philosophical text written in Siddham ends a high proportion of its words with the stroke this letter stands for, and a scribe who confused it with the short vowel would be changing the gender of what was written, not merely its length.

The script is named from a word rather than from a place or a people. Siddham is a Sanskrit form meaning accomplished or perfected, and it stands at the head of a text as an invocation of success, sometimes in a fuller phrase amounting to a wish that there be accomplishment. A learner beginning the syllabary began by writing it, and the practice of opening with the word is old enough that the name transferred from the invocation to the letters themselves. In Japan the script is called shittan, the same word carried through Chinese, and the study of it is shittan-gaku.

Naming a script from the first thing written in it is not unusual, and the abecedaries of the Mediterranean world do something similar by a different route, taking their names from their opening letters. What is unusual here is that the name is a wish rather than a sound. It records what the script was for in the eyes of the people who taught it: not a neutral technology for putting language on a surface, but a thing whose use began with an act of intention.

The name does a practical job for scholarship as well. Indian palaeography distinguishes a family of related hands descended from the Brahmi of the Gupta period, and the label Siddhamatrka marks the branch this script belongs to. Siddham in the narrower East Asian sense is what that hand became once it had been carried out of India and kept in use by traditions that needed it for a purpose India itself had stopped serving.