Where the embellishment is above the letter itself (with or without the addition of a following vertical bar), namely for i T e o ai au, these should link to the character where it joins the top horizontal bar, and where the character meets the bar more than once, to the rightmost junction. For example: f^ ki ^ ne These syllables are connected together to form words: they are literally connected by the horizontal bar. For example: devanagarT ^^H I g ll matrka <Hld«M vadami veda gita guru 6. A. 2 History of Vowel Embellishment It bothers some students that, in a script read from left to right, there should be the seeming anomaly that ki (Th>) for example, is written back to front as it were, with the i-sign before the consonant. Originally the embellishment for i after a consonant had no down stroke at all, so that ki ke kai were written as: ki ^ ke %> kai % However, as personality tends to intrude into handwriting, it could prove difficult to distinguish between ki and ke, especially if the 'flag' was written somewhere between the two positions. To solve this problem, the downstroke was added for ki. Whether this is true or not, is debatable, but it does make a nice story !
