The Letter in Print, in Unicode, and in the Count of Fifty

Because the letter has a place in the canonical order, it has continued to be provided for at every stage of the technology used to write Sanskrit. Devanagari typefaces cut for scholarly printing carried it; so do the digital fonts that replaced them. The Unicode Standard encodes it as a distinct character with its own codepoint, and encodes the matching vowel sign separately, so that a text can represent a form containing it even though no such form is known to occur. That is the correct decision for a character encoding, whose job is to represent the writing system rather than to audit the vocabulary, and it is the same reasoning the grammarians applied.

The letter also matters to the count. The Tantric traditions that treat the alphabet as a garland of matrika generally reckon fifty letters, and reaching fifty requires including all four vocalic liquids alongside the two marks for the nasal and the breath. A count that dropped the letters the language does not use would not come to fifty, so the traditions that build on the number depend on exactly this completeness. Andre Padoux's study of the concept of the word in the Hindu Tantras sets out how the schools arrange and interpret the series, and how much their arrangements differ from one another. This atlas records the letter's membership of the series and leaves each school's further attributions to that school.