The Conjuncts Taught as Letters

Devanagari primers commonly finish the alphabet chart with two or three conjuncts, most often the cluster of the first consonant with this sibilant, the cluster of the dental stop with the semivowel ra, and the cluster of the palatal nasal with the voiced palatal that opens the word for knowledge. They are printed in the same grid as the letters and learned in the same recitation, and a great many learners consequently believe the alphabet has a few more members than it does. It does not.

The varnamala has fourteen independent vowels and thirty-three consonants, and these three are compound signs built from letters already in the table. They are taught because they are frequent, because their written forms are far enough from their components to need separate learning, and because the last of them is pronounced so differently across the subcontinent that a learner benefits from meeting it explicitly. This atlas seeds the forty-seven letters and not the conjuncts, on the ground that a conjunct is a way of writing a sequence rather than a member of the series. That is a decision about scope and it is recorded here so that a reader who counts the entries and expects fifty knows why the count comes out where it does.