Aira in the Scribal Tradition

Aira is central to a feature of the Guru Granth Sahib that surprises readers who come to it from modern Punjabi: its spelling is not modern Punjabi spelling. The scripture preserves an older orthography in which vowel endings are written where present speech has dropped them, and many of those endings are carried on or around Aira. Sikh scholarship treats those endings as grammatical information rather than as decoration, since they mark case and number in the older language, and reciters and scholars read them accordingly. That is one reason the Sikh tradition has resisted modernising the text: an editorial tidy of the vowels would delete meaning, and the volume is in any case treated as a living Guru whose wording is not open to revision.

Aira also sits at the centre of a practical scribal difficulty. Its bare form and its form with the kanna differ by a single stroke, and in a manuscript hand written at speed, with the headline running unbroken across the word, the presence or absence of that stroke is the whole difference between two words. Copyists working on a bir, a complete manuscript volume of the scripture, were expected to work slowly for exactly this reason, and comparison of the surviving early manuscripts turns on such details, since a variant vowel is the kind of evidence that shows which copy descends from which.