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Devanagari conjuncts
Aspect of Indian writing system From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Conjunct consonants are a form of orthographic ligature characteristic of the Brahmic scripts. They are constructed of more than two consonant letters. Biconsonantal conjuncts are common, but longer conjuncts are increasingly constrained by the languages' phonologies and the actual number of conjuncts observed drops sharply. Ulrich Stiehl includes a five-letter Devanagari conjunct र्त्स्न्य (rtsny)[1] among the top 360 most frequent conjuncts found in Classical Sanskrit;[2] the complete list appears below. Another five-letter conjunct, ङ्क्ष्ण्व (ṅkṣṇv) is possible.[3] Conjuncts often span a syllable boundary, and many of the conjuncts below occur only in the middle of words, where the coda consonants of one syllable are conjoined with the onset consonants of the following syllable.
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Biconsonantal conjuncts
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The table below shows all 1296 combinations of two Sanskrit letters. The table is formed by collating the 36 consonants of Sanskrit plus ळ (which is not used in Sanskrit), as listed in Masica (1991:161–162). Not all of these form conjuncts (these instead show a halanta under the first letter), and the number that do will vary with the Devanagari font installed. There is variation in the conjuncts that are in use for any given language. Some of the combinations below that do not form conjuncts may not be viable combinations in any language.
The romanization (in ISO 15919[4]) and IPA of each conjunct will appear with mouseover.
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Tri-, tetra- and penta-consonantal conjuncts
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Irregular ligatures
Ten of the ligatures for biconsonantal conjuncts are irregular; their construction is not obvious based on how Devanagari ligatures are usually formed.[5] In Hindi, they are not especially widespread, but do appear in several common terms of Sanskrit origin, such as श्री (śrī) and क्षत्रिय (kṣatríya). The ten irregular ligatures are as follow:
Most frequent conjuncts
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These are the 360 most-frequent conjuncts in Sanskrit:[2]
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References
Notes
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