Retroflexion in the Table and in the Rules

The retroflex class occupies a full row of the varnamala, five letters like every other class, and the completeness is the point: having established that retroflexion is one of the five places at which Sanskrit makes a closure, the grammarians recorded all four stop combinations and the nasal at that place, whether or not the inherited vocabulary filled every one. The result is a table in which the retroflex row is structurally identical to the velar and dental rows even though the language uses those rows much more heavily. Beside the inherited retroflexes there are the derived ones.

A dental sibilant or nasal is converted to its retroflex counterpart when certain retroflex or r-like sounds occur earlier in the same word, and the conditions are stated in the grammar with a precision that has attracted a great deal of modern attention because the rules interact in intricate ways. A reader of a Sanskrit text therefore meets retroflexes at places where the underlying form had a dental, and undoing the change is part of the analysis a student is trained to perform. This atlas records the letter's place, its articulation and its behaviour, and does not assign it a numerical or symbolic value, because Sanskrit does not assign individual letters such values.