Vocalic R: A Consonant That Carries a Syllable

Vocalic r is the seventh letter of the varnamala and one of the features that most clearly separates Sanskrit from the modern European languages descended from the same ancestor: an r that functions as a vowel, forming the nucleus of a syllable with no other vowel beside it. English speakers meet something close to it in the second syllable of a word like butter, but Sanskrit treats it as a full vowel with its own letter, its own vowel sign and its own short and long forms. It appears in a great deal of core vocabulary, including the names Krishna and Rigveda and the word rishi for a seer, all of which are conventionally transliterated with an i that the classical description does not put there. The Sanskrit phoneticians class it as retroflex, murdhanya, formed with the tip of the tongue curled back towards the roof of the mouth, and place it accordingly in the scheme. Its vowel sign is a small curl written beneath the consonant.

Modern pronunciation across northern India generally realises it as ri or ru, which is why transliteration practice varies and why the same word appears in English books spelled several ways; the classical grammatical descriptions treat it as a single vowel sound rather than as a consonant with a vowel attached, and the difference between those two descriptions is a difference between a historical reconstruction and a living pronunciation, not a disagreement about the letter.