The Two Dots, and What Survived the Reduction

The visarga is the second of the two marks that Brahmi carries outside the letters proper, the other being the anusvara. It is written as two dots and it represents a breath, the voiceless outward release that a final sibilant becomes in the environments the grammar specifies. Like the anusvara it is inherited by every script descended from Brahmi, and like the anusvara its status is unsettled: counted among the vowels it makes the Sanskrit total sixteen rather than fourteen, and different traditions count differently.

When Middle Indo-Aryan reduced the three sibilants to one, this is the letter that generally survived, so the single sibilant of most of the Ashokan edicts is written with this sign. That makes it one of the best attested consonants in the earliest Brahmi and a good letter for a palaeographer to work from, in contrast to the palatal and retroflex sibilants whose early attestation is thin and regionally restricted.

It also means a reader of the edicts sees this letter where a Sanskrit text would show any of the three, and cannot tell from the writing which one the underlying word had. Recovering that requires knowing the Sanskrit form, which is one of the ordinary reasons a Prakrit inscription is edited with its Sanskrit equivalents alongside it rather than presented alone.