Ura ੳ

Ura is the first of the thirty-five letters of the Gurmukhi painti and the first of its three vowel bearers, the others being Aira and Iri. It is written as a single stroke dropped from the headline and turned to the left at the foot, a shape shared with no other letter in the script. Gurmukhi is an abugida rather than an alphabet: every consonant sign carries an inherent short a, and the other vowels are written as marks placed above, below, before or after that consonant. The system leaves one gap. A syllable that begins with a vowel has no consonant for the mark to sit on, and the three bearers exist to fill it. They are silent frames, and the vowel sign written on a bearer supplies the whole of the sound.

The ten vowels of Gurmukhi are divided among the three according to where in the mouth they are made. Ura takes the rounded back vowels: u with the aunkar written beneath it, the long oo with the doubled form of the same mark, and o with the hora written above. Aira takes a, the long aa, ai and au. Iri takes i, the long ee and e. A learner therefore acquires two things at once, the vowel marks themselves and the bearer each one belongs to, and a vowel written on the wrong bearer is a spelling mistake and not an alternative. Ura standing bare, with no vowel mark at all, does not occur, because a bearer with nothing to bear has nothing to say.

The vowels built on Ura open a great many of the words that recur through the Guru Granth Sahib, and the letter also carries a weight out of proportion to its frequency, because the sign that stands at the head of the scripture is built from it. Ik Onkar, the opening figure of the Sikh scripture and of most Sikh compositions, joins the numeral one to the Onkar sign, and the vowel in Onkar is the one Gurmukhi writes on Ura. That emblem is reproduced more often than any other piece of Gurmukhi writing, carved over gurdwara doorways, worked into metal and cloth, and set at the head of manuscripts and printed editions alike, so the outline of Ura is among the most widely seen letterforms in the Punjab.

Copying the Guru Granth Sahib is governed by strict discipline, because Sikh practice treats the physical volume as a living Guru rather than as a book about one, and a scribe gives the bearers the same exactness as any consonant: a bearer set wrong changes the word, and the word is the point. The bearers also survived the move from pen to type with less alteration than most letters. Their outlines are simple, they take few joins with their neighbours, and when Gurmukhi was first cut as metal type in the nineteenth century the shapes that needed the most compromise were the conjuncts and the subjoined forms rather than Ura and its two companions.