Devanagari Vocalic R ऋ

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.

The sound opens the name of the oldest surviving Indian text. Rigveda is rc plus veda, the first element meaning a verse of praise and carrying vocalic r as its only vowel, so a reader who does not know the sound cannot pronounce the title of the corpus correctly. The same vowel runs through the vocabulary of the tradition: the word for a seer, for the order that holds the cosmos together in Vedic thought, and the name of the deity most widely worshipped in later Hinduism all carry it. That frequency is why the grammarians gave it a full place in the vowel series rather than treating it as a variant of a consonant.

Panini names it in the Shivasutras alongside the other vowels, and the rules governing what happens when it meets other sounds at a word join are among the more intricate in the Ashtadhyayi, since it can behave in some environments as a vowel and in others as the consonant it is historically related to. Sanskrit also records a long vocalic r, held for two morae, which occupies the next place in the varnamala and occurs almost nowhere in actual words; it exists chiefly to complete the pattern of short and long that the rest of the vowel series follows. This atlas records vocalic r's place in the series, its articulation, and its membership of the fifty-letter garland counted in the Tantric traditions, without adopting any one school's further attributions to it.