What the Retroflex Class Proves About the Inventory

Whatever the ultimate source of the Brahmi letter shapes, the shape of the inventory is Indian. The retroflex class is the cleanest demonstration. Five signs are provided for a series of sounds that no script of western Asia had any letters for, because no language written with those scripts had the sounds, and the five sit in the table exactly where the analysis puts them, third of the five classes, between the palatals and the dentals in a sequence running from the back of the mouth to the front.

An inventory taken over wholesale from a Semitic model would have had to invent these letters from nothing and find somewhere to put them, and the obvious place would have been the end of the list, which is where such scripts normally file their additions and where Brahmi itself files the retroflex lateral and where Tamil-Brahmi files its three Dravidian consonants. That the retroflex class instead sits in the middle of the order, integrated into the pattern, indicates that the arrangement was worked out as a whole rather than assembled by additions. The question of where the shapes came from remains open and epigraphists continue to argue it; the question of where the structure came from does not.