Twenty Stops, Then a Change of Principle

This letter completes the twenty stops of the five by five table. After the labial nasal that follows it the classed consonants are finished, and the order changes its organising principle: the semivowels, the sibilants and the aspirate are grouped by manner rather than by place of articulation, because manner is what distinguishes them and place no longer does the work.

That change of principle is the most interesting joint in the whole arrangement, and it is where the Indian analysis had to make a decision rather than apply a rule. The semivowels are placed to match the vowels they answer to, so their internal order comes from the vowel table rather than from anything about the semivowels themselves. The three sibilants are ordered back to front, borrowing the principle from the stops. The aspirate is put last on the reasoning that it is made at the vocal folds, further back than anything else, and there is nowhere else to go.

The result is a table that is regular where regularity is possible and honestly ad hoc where it is not, and the tradition never pretended otherwise. That is a considerable intellectual achievement for a description of speech worked out well before the common era, and it is the reason the Brahmi order has needed no rearrangement in two thousand years.