Frequency, and What It Does and Does Not Tell You

Some letters of the varnamala are used constantly and others almost never, and the table gives no sign of the difference. The dentals are among the heaviest used; the vocalic liquids and several of the retroflexes are among the lightest. A learner working from a chart of forty-seven equal squares will not know which is which, and will spend the same effort on a letter confined to forms of one verbal root as on one that opens a tenth of the vocabulary. This atlas states the frequency where it is worth stating, because it is a fact about the language that the chart conceals. What frequency does not tell you is anything about importance in the traditions that use the script.

The letters given the most weight in the religious literature are chosen for reasons that have nothing to do with how often they occur: the first sound of the alphabet, the sounds of Om, the last consonant of the table. Those selections are made by the traditions and are recorded here as theirs, sourced to the scholarly literature that describes them, rather than being inferred from the shape of the table or extended by analogy to letters no tradition singled out. This atlas therefore records frequency where it is known and marks it as frequency, and records a tradition's selection where a tradition made one and marks it as that tradition's. Keeping the two apart is what stops a reference work from manufacturing significance out of a statistic, or from quietly promoting a common letter into an important one because there was more to say about it.