A revised and expanded version of this paper will appear in Word Structure 15.1 (Spring 2022). For a link to the accepted manuscript, see the author’s home page (www.f.waseda.jp/dechene). It is proposed that the alternations ā ～ a and a ～ Ø in the stem-final syllable of Sanskrit nominals such as rā́jān- ‘king’ and dātār- ‘giver’ are due to rules of shortening and syncope. If so, those alternations provide no support, contrary to claims in the literature, for a framework in which stem alternants are associated with “morphomic indices” by stem-indexing rules and, more generally, no support for a morphomic or purely morphological level of representation mediating between morphosyntax and morphophonology.