147. Syllabic Tendencies
One trait of Indian alphabets leads back to their direct Semitic origin: they did not recognize the vowels. The Hindus speaking Indo-European were confronted with the same difficulty as the Greeks when they took over the vowelless Semitic alphabet. But they solved the difficulty in their own way. They assumed that a consonantal letter stood for a consonant plus a vowel. Thus, each letter was really the sign for a syllable. The most common vowel in Sanskrit being A, this was assumed as being inherent in the consonant. For instance, their letter for K was not read K, but KA. This meant that when K was to be read merely as K, it had to be specially designated: something had to be done to take away the vowel A. A diacritical sign was added, known as the virama. This negative sign is a “point” just as much as the positive vowel points of Hebrew; but was used to denote exactly the opposite.
There are of course other vowels than A in Sanskrit. These were represented by diacritical marks analogous to the virama. Thus while this is a diagonal stroke below the consonant, U is represented by a small curve below, E by a backward curve above, AI by two such, and so on.
If a syllable had two consonants before the vowel, these were condensed into one, the essential parts of each being combined into a more complex character. This was much as if we were to write “try” by forcing t and r into a special character showing the cross stroke of the t and the roll or hook of the r, and superposing a diæresis for the vowel. This process reduced every syllable to a single though often compound letter. If the syllable ended in a consonant, this carried over as the beginning of the next syllable. Even the end consonant of a word was written as the first letter of the next. According to the Sanskrit plan, “the dog is mad” would be rendered “the do gi sma d-.”
Obviously, there is something unnaturally regular, a systematic artificiality, about such a scheme. Love of system cropped out otherwise. The Hindus devised a new symbol—mainly by differentiation of old ones—for every sound that they had and Semitic lacked. Thus they doubled the number of their letters. Then they rearranged their order on a phonetic and logical basis. All sounds made against the back palate were brought into one group; those formed against the fore-palate, gums, and teeth came after; the lip sounds last. Within each of the groups the letters followed one another in a fixed order according to their method of production—voiceless stops always first, nasals always last.
The result of these innovations was that the Hindu alphabets diverged much more from the Semitic original than did ours. This perhaps was really to be expected, since writing entered India by long leaps between peoples that were not in intimate relations. Also, by the time the alphabet first reached them, the Hindus, in the isolation of their remote peninsula, had already worked out an advanced and unique type of civilization. This fact must have predisposed them to make over any imported invention in conformity with their established habits.