One Alphabet, Several Recitation Traditions

The alternation between l and r in the Vedic material is a useful way into something the varnamala as a chart cannot show: that the corpus written in this script was transmitted by several schools with their own recitation practices, and that those schools differ from each other in detail. A Vedic text belongs to a particular school, which had its own version of the text and its own way of reciting it, including features of pronunciation that the writing does not always distinguish. The retroflex lateral is one of those: it is a real sound in the recitation of certain Vedic schools and is written where the tradition requires it, while the classical language treated it as a variant and the standard varnamala has no separate place for it.

Modern printed editions therefore differ in whether they mark it, according to which tradition they follow. None of this is visible from a table of the letters, and a reader who takes the chart as a complete description of what Sanskrit sounds like will be surprised by a recitation. This atlas records the classical letter, its articulation and its place, and notes the retroflex counterpart as a real sound with its own sign that the classical table does not carry as a separate letter.