The Five Places, Stated Once

Because every letter of the four stop classes covered in this account is described by its coordinates, it is worth setting the coordinate system out in one place. Sanskrit closes the vocal tract at five points, and the grammarians named each after the part of the mouth involved: the soft palate, the hard palate, the crown of the mouth behind the teeth ridge, the teeth themselves, and the lips. Those five names give the five vargas their order, running from back to front.

Within each class the four stops are generated by two independent yes-or-no features, whether the vocal folds vibrate during the closure and whether breath is released after it, and the nasal made at the same place closes the class. The scheme accounts for twenty-five of the thirty-three Sanskrit consonants exactly, with no leftovers and no letters that fail to fit. The four semivowels and the three sibilants with h follow it in the table and are described by different criteria, but the stops are wholly regular. Recognising a modern articulatory phonetics chart in that description is not an anachronism; it is the reason the Indian phonetic tradition is treated in the history of linguistics as an independent and very early achievement, and it is the reason the varnamala is a different kind of object from the alphabets of the Mediterranean world.