A Semivowel That Goes Underneath

The semivowels are the consonants most often found as the second member of a cluster, and this one especially so, because a great many Sanskrit suffixes and verbal formations put it directly after another consonant. In a script that writes a cluster by stacking the second element beneath the first, that means the letter spends much of its life in a reduced subscript form rather than in its full shape.

The descendant scripts developed those subscript forms in different directions, and the divergence is one of the standard groupings in Indian palaeography. Several of the northern alphabets reduced the subscript form of this letter to a stroke barely resembling the full letter; several southern ones kept a recognisable version; and the scripts of Southeast Asia generalised the principle, giving every consonant a regular subscript form used whenever it is the second member of a cluster.

Brahmi itself is less systematic than any of them. Its conjuncts are formed rather than standardised, the same cluster can be written more than one way in different periods and regions, and a reader has to recognise combined shapes case by case. That is one of the genuine difficulties of the script for a beginner, and it is a place where the parent is harder than most of its children rather than easier.