A Letter That Records a Rule

It is unusual for a writing system to carry, in an ordinary letter, the output of a phonological process that the tradition also describes explicitly, and the retroflex nasal is one of the clearest cases in Devanagari. The dental nasal is the basic sound; the retroflex nasal is very largely what the dental becomes in a defined environment; and both have their own letters in the table, so the written form shows the result while the grammar states the cause. The retroflex sibilant behaves the same way, arising by a comparable rule from the dental sibilant, so two of the retroflex letters are in this position. This is one reason the varnamala repays being read as a system rather than as a list of signs.

A reader who knows the rules can look at a written Sanskrit word and reconstruct what its parts were before combination, which is exactly what a reciter or a commentator has to do. A reader who has only memorised the letters cannot. The atlas records for this letter its place in the table, its articulation, and the rule that produces most of its occurrences, all of which are attested in the grammatical literature. It assigns no numerical or symbolic value, because Sanskrit does not assign individual letters such values, and it records the letter's membership of the fifty-letter garland counted in the Tantric traditions without adopting any school's further attributions.