Cha and the Economy of Panini's Rules

The reason the regularity of the vargas matters so much is visible in how Sanskrit grammar is written. Panini's Ashtadhyayi states the grammar of the language in a few thousand extremely compressed rules, and the compression depends on being able to name a class of sounds in one or two syllables. The device that makes it possible is a set of abbreviations built from the Shivasutras, fourteen short lines listing the sounds of the language in an order engineered so that any needed class can be named by taking a starting sound and a marker.

A rule that applies to all aspirated stops, or to all voiceless stops, or to all sounds made at the palate, can then be written in a handful of characters. That machinery only works because the sound system has been analysed into features first. The varnamala and the Shivasutras are two arrangements of the same analysis, the first ordered for teaching and reference, the second ordered for the abbreviation system, and a letter such as cha has a determinate place in both. This atlas records the letter's place in the varnamala and its articulation, and does not assign it any numerical or symbolic value, because Sanskrit does not assign individual letters such values in the way Hebrew and Greek do.