Three Sibilants, and Then One

Old Indo-Aryan holds three sibilants apart and Middle Indo-Aryan reduced the set, so the Prakrit of most of the Ashokan edicts writes a single sibilant where Sanskrit writes three. The distinction the three letters make therefore belongs more to the Brahmi that was later adapted for Sanskrit than to the language of the earliest inscriptions, and a reader of the edicts meets far fewer sibilant contrasts than a reader of a classical text.

Which sibilants a dialect kept, and which one the reduced set collapsed onto, is one of the standard tests by which the Prakrits are grouped, and the edicts supply the earliest evidence for it. Because the same proclamations were cut at sites across an empire in several different dialects, the corpus offers direct comparisons: the same word in the same formula, spelled differently in two places, differing in exactly this feature.

The letter is well attested in the northwestern material and thinly attested elsewhere in the third century BCE, which makes it one of the harder signs for a palaeographer to date. Where a letter is rare in the earliest period, its later shapes have to be placed by inference from the letters beside it, and the resulting sequence is less firm than it is for the common consonants. That unevenness in the evidence is worth keeping in mind whenever a date is offered for a hand.