Siddham Ya 𑖧

Ya is the palatal semivowel and the first of the four semivowels, which the phoneticians place after the twenty-five stops as a group of their own. The four are recited as a block, in the fixed order ya, ra, la, va, and they are learned that way.

The tradition pairs each semivowel with the vowel formed at the same point of articulation, so ya answers to i, ra to the vocalic r, la to the vocalic l, and va to u. That pairing is not a mnemonic. It is a claim about how the sounds are made, and it underwrites the rules by which Sanskrit converts one into the other at a word boundary: a word ending in i followed by a word beginning with a vowel produces this letter, constantly, on any page.

It is frequent in the vocabulary as well, standing in a large number of roots and in several very common suffixes, including the one that forms gerundives and the one that forms a large class of abstract nouns.

In conjuncts it takes a reduced form, and that form is one of the shapes a learner of the script has to acquire separately, since it does not resemble the full letter closely. The seed syllable of Maitreya is built on this letter, with the vowel u written beneath it.

Its pairing with the vowel i also means that a form containing this letter very often contained that vowel a step earlier in the derivation. Reading Sanskrit is in large part a matter of running such steps backwards, and the semivowels are among the clearest signals that a step has been taken at all.

The four semivowels sit between the stops and the sibilants in the order, and the position is not a leftover. The phoneticians classified them as sounds made with a narrowing of the vocal tract that does not amount to a closure, which puts them between the stops, where the tract closes completely, and the sibilants, where the narrowing produces friction. The order of the table is a gradient as well as a tour of the mouth.

Their pairing with the vowels is the more consequential idea. Each semivowel is treated as the consonantal counterpart of a vowel formed at the same place, and Sanskrit grammar makes constant use of the relationship: vowels become semivowels before other vowels, semivowels become vowels in certain formations, and the strengthening grades that build so much of the vocabulary move between the two. A description that did not connect them would have to state the same rules twice.

For a reader this is one of the places where knowing the table pays. A form that looks unfamiliar is very often a familiar root with a vowel turned into its semivowel or the reverse, and recognising the pairing is what makes the underlying word visible. The four letters are learned as a block because they behave as one.