The Table Read as a Whole

With the fifth class the twenty-five stops are complete, and it is worth reading the arrangement as a single object rather than as five rows learned one after another. Sanskrit closes the vocal tract at five points. At each point, two independent features, whether the vocal folds vibrate during the closure and whether breath is released after it, generate four stops. At each point there is exactly one possible nasal, made by lowering the soft palate so the air escapes through the nose, and that nasal closes the class. Five places times five members gives twenty-five, with nothing left over and no letter that fails to fit.

What follows in the table is described by different criteria: four semivowels that correspond to four of the vowels, and three sibilants with the breath h, grouped as the sounds made with continuous air rather than a closure. The whole of it is an analysis of the sound system of one language, presented in the order that the analysis implies. That is what makes the varnamala a different kind of object from the Greek, Hebrew and Roman alphabets covered elsewhere in this atlas, whose order preserves an inherited Phoenician sequence and carries no phonetic information at all. It is also why a Sanskrit dictionary is alphabetised by articulation and why a grammatical rule can name a class of sounds in two syllables.