Devanagari E ए

E is the eleventh letter of the varnamala and the first of the four the grammarians call sandhyakshara, the sounds formed by combination. Historically it is the outcome of a and i coming together, and Sanskrit treats it as exactly that: it is always long, it has no short partner anywhere in the series, and it counts as a heavy syllable in every metre, even though it is written with a single letter and a single vowel sign.

A learner used to European alphabets, where e is an ordinary short vowel, has to unlearn that expectation before reading Sanskrit metre correctly. The vowel sign is a slanted stroke placed above the headline of the consonant it follows. Devanagari uses the space above the line as freely as the space beside and below it, and the headline running along the top of a word is what makes those upper marks legible as attachments rather than as free-floating strokes. The independent letter shown on this page is used where a word opens with the vowel or where it follows another vowel across a join. The rule that produces e from a and i is not a historical curiosity but an operating part of the grammar. Sanskrit applies sandhi, the euphonic combination of adjacent sounds, across word boundaries as well as inside words, and it applies it in writing, so a recited or manuscript text shows e wherever a word ending in a met a word beginning with i. Reading such a text back into its constituent words is a skill taught alongside the alphabet.

The four combination vowels exist in the alphabet largely because of a mechanism that runs through the whole of Sanskrit word formation. The grammarians describe a ladder of strengthening applied to the vowel of a root when derivatives and certain tenses are built from it, with two steps above the basic grade, called guna and vrddhi. Short i strengthens to e at the first step and to ai at the second; short u strengthens to o and then to au. The four sandhyakshara are therefore not decorative additions to the vowel series but the products of a systematic process, and their presence in the table is the table recording that process.

Panini states the strengthening rules in the Ashtadhyayi using the abbreviations built from the Shivasutras, and the economy of that statement is one of the things that has made the grammar an object of study in its own right for well over two thousand years. For a reader of the atlas the practical consequence is that e is common, that it is always heavy, and that its presence in a word often signals a derived form rather than a root.

In the Tantric arrangement of the alphabet the vowels stand as a class before the consonants and this letter is one of the fifty matrika counted in the garland. What individual schools make of it beyond that is theirs, and the scholarly literature presents those readings as the positions of particular traditions rather than as a single system.