Conjuncts, and the Shapes a Learner Acquires Separately

The forty-seven letters are the easy part of Siddham. The difficulty is the conjuncts. Where two or more consonants come together with no vowel between them, they are written as a single joined shape, and Sanskrit produces such clusters constantly, both inside words and across the joins between them.

Some conjuncts are transparent. One letter is written in reduced form beneath or beside another, the parts stay recognisable, and a reader who knows the letters can read the cluster. Others are not. A handful of very common combinations have shapes that cannot be derived from their components at all and have to be learned as characters in their own right, and several letters have reduced forms that look nothing like their full versions. The semivowel ra is the extreme case, written above the syllable when it precedes and below when it follows, in two marks neither of which resembles the letter.

This is why learning the script is not the same as learning the letters, and why the manuals produced by the Japanese study of Siddham devote so much of their space to tables of combinations. It is also why counts of Siddham characters vary so widely. A list of the letters is forty-seven items long. A list of what a reader has actually to recognise on a manuscript page is very much longer.