What a Nearly Empty Letter Shows About the Alphabet

It is worth being explicit about the difference between this letter and its neighbours in a way that a table of the alphabet does not make obvious. The vowels a, i and u are the three most frequent sounds in Sanskrit; vocalic r is common enough to open the name of the oldest surviving Indian text; vocalic l occurs in forms of one root. A learner meeting the varnamala as a grid of equal squares can reasonably conclude that the letters in it are of comparable importance, and they are not. What they are is comparably justified: each has a determinate place in the articulatory analysis, and the analysis is what the order records. The letter also marks a point where Sanskrit and its relatives diverge.

Vocalic liquids are reconstructed for the ancestor language that Sanskrit shares with Greek, Latin and the rest, and most of the descendants resolved them into a vowel plus a consonant. Sanskrit kept them as vowels and its grammarians described them as such, which is one of the reasons the language was so useful to nineteenth-century comparative philology and why Whitney's grammar, written in that period, is careful about exactly this class of sound. In the Tantric reading of the alphabet as a garland of matrika the letter is one of the fifty counted in the series. Individual schools attach further correspondences to individual letters; those correspondences differ between traditions and are not adopted here.