A Sign Waiting for a Language

Like the short syllabic r before it, this letter has nothing to do in the Prakrit of the Ashokan edicts, whose sound system had no syllabic vowels at all. It belongs to the Sanskrit-writing use of the script rather than to the earliest inscriptions, and the surviving epigraphic material of the third century BCE gives no occasion to cut it. Its earliest attestations therefore come from later material, and the sign is among those a palaeographer has the fewest examples of to work from when dating a hand.

Its survival is a matter of transmission rather than of use. The order of letters was learned and recited as a whole object, and a position in that order is not conditional on there being words in the language that need it. Every script descended from Brahmi carries the letter forward, including scripts adapted for Dravidian and Southeast Asian languages that have no syllabic liquids of any kind, and it is still taught in eighth place in the alphabets of South Asia today. The Unicode Standard encodes it in the Brahmi block alongside the letters that are in constant use, for the same reason that a printed alphabet chart includes it: the order is the object, and the order is complete.