What the Breath Separates

Aspiration in these languages is not emphasis and not an accent. It separates one word from another, and a speaker who drops it is not speaking less forcefully but saying something else. Sanskrit and the Prakrit of the Ashokan edicts both hold the two velars apart throughout their vocabulary, and Brahmi accordingly gives the aspirated one a letter of its own rather than a mark added to the unaspirated sign. That is a real decision about how to write a language and not the only one available: a script could as easily have written the feature with a diacritic, as the Semitic scripts of western Asia came to do for sounds they lacked signs for.

Writing aspiration as a separate letter is what makes the Indian consonant table run to thirty-four signs rather than to a smaller set with modifiers, and it is the decision that gives the table its five by five shape. Each class holds four stops because voice and aspiration vary independently, and a learner who has the pattern for one class has it for all five. The cost is a large inventory; the return is that a reader is told the aspiration rather than left to infer it from context, and that a word can be read correctly by someone who does not know it. In the descendant scripts of the north this letter later took a subscript dot to write the velar fricative that arrived with Persian and Arabic vocabulary, a use that lies many centuries beyond anything Brahmi itself was asked to record.