Sounds the Table Does Not Have

It is worth being explicit about what a phonetic table of one language does when other languages adopt it. The varnamala is an analysis of Sanskrit, and it is complete for Sanskrit: every consonant of the classical language has a place, and there are no places without a sound. When Hindi, Urdu's Devanagari-written registers, Marathi and the rest came to be written with the script, they brought sounds the analysis did not cover, chiefly from Persian and Arabic, and the script accommodated them by marking the nearest existing letter with a dot rather than by adding rows to the table or reordering it. That decision preserved the classical arrangement intact and kept the shared literacy that lets a reader of one Devanagari language sound out a text in another. It also means that the modern script carries a visible boundary between the classical analysis and everything added since, which is unusual and useful.

For this atlas the consequence is a rule about what to record. Each letter's value is its classical value, stated as the grammarians stated it; the modern dotted variants are recorded as modern additions where they exist; and no letter is given a numerical or symbolic value, because the Sanskrit tradition does not assign individual letters such values in the way Hebrew gematria and Greek isopsephy do.