Siddham Vocalic Rr 𑖇

The long vocalic r occupies the eighth place of the order and almost nothing else. Its occurrence in the language is confined to one grammatical context, the genitive plural of stems ending in the short vocalic r, and even there it competes with alternative formations. A scribe copying Buddhist texts might go through a long working life without writing it more than a handful of times.

The letter is in the table because the table is built on pairs. Every vowel quality the phoneticians recognised is entered with a short and a long member, and the vocalic liquids are treated exactly as the simple vowels are, with no allowance made for how often the language happens to use them. Frequency was not the organising principle and was not meant to be.

For the East Asian traditions that received the script this had a particular effect. What was handed over was the order, complete, and a student learning shittan learned the whole of it, including the letters that would never be needed for anything. The table was the object being transmitted, and a partial table would have been a different object. That is a different relationship to a writing system than the one a working scribe has with the letters of a language, and it explains why the Japanese tradition preserves letters that practical Indian writing had every reason to let go.

The Sanskrit letter table is made to be said aloud, and its structure is what makes that possible. The vowels come first in a fixed order of pairs, then twenty-five stops arranged in five groups of five, then the semivowels, the sibilants and the aspirate. Within each group of five the sequence is always the same: voiceless, voiceless aspirate, voiced, voiced aspirate, nasal. A learner who has the rule can recite any group from its first letter, and can name any letter from its position without ever having seen it written.

Recitation of this kind does more than fix an order in memory. Because the arrangement is by where and how a sound is made, saying the table in order is a walk through the mouth from the throat to the lips, and the learner is rehearsing the analysis at the same time as the sequence. A table arranged in the arbitrary order the Mediterranean scripts inherited teaches nothing about sound at all.

In East Asia the recited table travelled better than the written one. It could be taught by voice, checked by ear and carried without a manuscript, and its influence turns up in places the script itself never reached. The Japanese kana are ordered on the Sanskrit principle rather than on any native one, and the standard chart of them is a grid of the same kind, read the same way. The order outlived the letters that carried it.