A Class the Middle Language Made Busier

The retroflex series expanded rather than contracted as Old Indo-Aryan gave way to Middle Indo-Aryan. A large family of inherited consonant clusters containing an r or a retroflex element assimilated into doubled retroflex stops, so words that show a cluster in Sanskrit routinely show a retroflex in the Prakrit of the Ashokan edicts. The class is if anything more prominent in the earliest surviving Brahmi than in the classical language the script was later adapted to write.

That gives the palaeographer a good supply of examples in the third century BCE, which is not true of every part of the inventory. It also means the retroflex letters can be traced continuously from the edicts through the donative records of the following centuries into the Kushana and Gupta hands and out into both branches of the family. The southern branch matters particularly here, because the Dravidian languages have the retroflex series independently and in full, so the letters that Indo-Aryan needed for a partly borrowed set of sounds were exactly what the languages of the far south required for sounds of their own. A script fitted to one family arrived in the south already carrying most of what the other family needed.