Every interrogative in Sanskrit is built on this consonant. Who, what, which, where, when, how and why are all forms of a single stem beginning with ka, declined and compounded in the ordinary way, so a question in the language announces itself by its first sound. The same stem supplies the indefinite pronouns when a particle is added to it, so someone, something and anyone are the interrogatives with a tag on the end. A reader working through an inscription learns to notice the letter for that reason before learning much else about it, and the Vedic hymns that ask which god an offering should be made to turn on exactly this word.
The letter also serves as one of the commonest suffixes in the language, added to a stem to form a diminutive, an adjective or simply a variant of the noun with no change of meaning, and it is the ending of an enormous number of ordinary words as a result. When it meets another consonant with no vowel between them, the two are written as a single conjunct rather than as two signs in sequence, and the conjuncts this letter forms are among the most frequent in any Sanskrit text. In the writing of a cluster the second consonant is stacked below or ligatured to the first, so a cluster of three occupies the vertical space that a script writing left to right in a single band would have no room for.