Siddham Vocalic R 𑖆

The vocalic r is a vowel that sounds like a consonant, and the Indian analysis is unambiguous that it is the former. It carries a syllable on its own, it takes the same short and long pairing as the other vowels, and it sits among them in the table rather than among the liquids. Its dependent form is a curl written beneath the consonant, sharing the space under the line with the u marks and with subjoined consonants.

The letter is not marginal. A substantial group of common Sanskrit nouns is built on stems ending in this vowel, including the kinship terms and a large class of agent nouns, and their inflection is one of the first paradigms a student of the language meets. The vowel also stands in the root behind the word for a seer and behind the name of the oldest of the Vedic collections, so the sign is met early and often in any text with a Vedic frame of reference.

Its pronunciation is where the tradition and modern practice part company. The classical description is of a single vowel sound, an r held as the nucleus of a syllable. Modern readings across India render it as ri or as ru depending on region, and transliteration conventions follow one or the other, which is why the same word turns up in Latin letters in more than one spelling. The Siddham letter is indifferent to all of this. It writes the vowel, and the reading is supplied by whoever is reading.

Writing Sanskrit in Latin letters requires either diacritics or compromises, and the choice reaches into how the language is understood by people who meet it in translation. The script has three sibilants where the Latin alphabet has one s. It has two full series of stops, one made at the teeth and one with the tongue curled back, where Latin has one t and one d. It has four vowels that carry a syllable on their own with no Latin equivalent at all, and a set of voiced aspirates that Latin writes with an added h in a way that invites exactly the wrong reading.

Where the diacritics are dropped, and outside specialist publishing they usually are, the distinctions disappear. Words that differ in the language become identical on the page, the aspirated dental is read as the sound in the English word think, and the retroflex series vanishes into the dental one. A reader working from that has no way of recovering what was written.

The Siddham letters have none of these problems, because each distinction has a character of its own and no character does double duty. The East Asian tradition made that argument in practice rather than in theory: it transcribed mantras into Chinese characters for approximate reading, and it also kept the Siddham original, because only the second could be read back. This atlas uses plain Latin spellings without diacritics, for readability, and the letter pages are where the distinctions those spellings lose are recorded.