Siddham I 𑖂

The dependent sign for short i attaches not to a letter but to a whole cluster. Where three consonants are joined into one conjunct, the vowel mark stands once, against the joined shape, because what it belongs to is the syllable and not any single character inside it. That is the point at which a reader trained on an alphabet has to change habits: the unit Siddham writes is the syllable, and a conjunct of three consonants carrying one vowel mark is one written thing rather than four.

Short i is among the most frequent vowels in the language, carried by a large number of grammatical endings as well as by the stems that take them, so the mark appears on almost every line of any Siddham text. Frequency of that kind has consequences for a hand. The signs a scribe writes many thousands of times are the ones that drift fastest, contract soonest and vary most between one copying tradition and another, which makes them correspondingly the most useful to a palaeographer trying to place an undated page.

The letter also stands behind the vowel e. The old analysis treats e as what results when a and i combine, so the strengthening grades the grammarians describe run upward from this vowel, and a reader who knows the rule can often see the short i inside a form that no longer writes it.

Siddham was written by hand for the whole of its working life, in India, along the routes east, in Chinese monasteries and in Japanese ones, and a script transmitted that way accumulates variation as a matter of course. The modern encoding of Siddham records the fact directly: alongside the standard shape of several letters it carries alternate forms, present because they occur in the manuscript record often enough that a text cannot be represented without them. Those alternates are ways of drawing the same letter and not additional letters, and the distinction matters to anyone trying to say how large the syllabary is.

Variation of that kind carries information. A hand that keeps an older shape after the Indian tradition has moved on tells you something about when and from where its exemplar came, and East Asian copies are full of such retentions, because the transmission ran by exemplar rather than by continuous contact. A Japanese scribe of a much later century might be reproducing faithfully a form that had gone out of use in India long before he was born.

It also creates the standing risk of any copied tradition. Two letters whose signs differ by a single small stroke are the ones a tired copyist merges, and the pairs at risk in Siddham are the short and long vowels, whose marks differ minimally, and the letters for the voiced labial stop and the labial semivowel, which are drawn alike in many hands. Where a text has passed through several generations of copying, an edition of it is partly a reconstruction of which of those a scribe intended.