Fourteen, Sixteen, or However Many

The number of vowels in the order is not a fixed figure, and the disagreement is instructive. Counted as this atlas counts them there are fourteen, running from short a to au. Counted with the anusvara and the visarga included there are sixteen, and those two are marks rather than letters, standing outside the alphabet proper and written as a dot and as a pair of dots. Some traditions count differently again. The variation is not carelessness; it reflects a real question about whether a sign that modifies a vowel belongs in the list of vowels.

That question is inherited by every script descended from Brahmi, which is why the alphabets of South Asia are quoted with different totals in different books and why the traditional figure of fifty letters for the Sanskrit alphabet requires a particular set of choices to arrive at. Brahmi itself has the anusvara and the visarga as signs and does not settle their status, leaving the matter to the grammatical tradition where it belongs. A reader meeting two different counts of the same alphabet has not found an error but a boundary dispute about what a letter is, and the dispute is older than any of the scripts now used to write these languages.