Rarity in Writing, Regularity in the System

It is worth setting the palatal nasal beside its neighbours to see what the table is claiming. All five nasals are real sounds of Sanskrit, and the grammarians located each at the place of articulation of its own class, which is correct and is confirmed by any modern phonetic description. But three of the five are positional, appearing only where a following stop calls for them, one is fully independent, and one sits between. A chart that shows five equal squares does not record that difference, and a learner who takes the chart at face value will expect to meet the palatal nasal at the head of words and never will. The atlas states the distribution alongside the articulation for exactly that reason.

On the symbolic side, this letter is one of the fifty matrika counted in the Tantric arrangement of the alphabet as a garland, and Andre Padoux's study of the concept of the word in the Hindu Tantras describes how the schools order and interpret the series and how far they differ from each other. What any one school attributes to this letter belongs to that school. This atlas records membership of the series and leaves the attributions where they were made. Counting the nasals also settles a question the chart raises and does not answer. Sanskrit has five nasal letters and one nasal mark, and the mark is not a sixth nasal: it is a way of writing whichever of the five the following consonant requires. The inventory of sounds and the inventory of signs therefore do not match one for one, which is true at several points in this script and is worth expecting.