One Table, Several Languages

Devanagari today writes Hindi, Marathi, Nepali and a number of other languages besides Sanskrit, and each of them has a slightly different relationship to the varnamala. Some places in the table are heavily used in one language and nearly empty in another; some sounds a modern language needs are absent from the table entirely and are written with a dot beneath the nearest letter; some letters that Sanskrit distinguishes are pronounced identically by most speakers of the modern languages, so that the script preserves distinctions that speech has merged. The three sibilants are the clearest case of that last pattern and the aspirated palatals are a case of the first.

None of this is a defect in the script. An alphabet that has been in continuous use for a millennium across a subcontinent will accumulate exactly these mismatches, and the alternative, redesigning the table for each language, would have cost the shared literacy that lets a reader of one of these languages sound out a text in another. This atlas records what is attested about each letter: its place in the classical table, its articulation as the grammarians described it, and where relevant the ways modern usage differs. It does not assert a symbolic or numerical value for any letter, because the Sanskrit tradition does not assign one.