Conjunct consonant Conjunct consonants are a type of letters, used for example in Brahmi or Brahmi derived modern scripts such as Balinese, Bengali, Devanagari, Gujarati, Tibetan, Dzongkha etc to write consonant clusters such as or . Although most of the time, le ...

s are a form of

orthographic ligature In writing and typography, a ligature occurs where two or more graphemes or letters are joined to form a single glyph. Examples are the characters and used in English and French, in which the letters and are joined for the first ligature a ...

characteristic of the

Brahmic scripts The Brahmic scripts, also known as Indic scripts, are a family of abugida writing systems. They are used throughout South Asia, Southeast Asia and parts of East Asia. They are descended from the Brahmi script of ancient India and are used b ...

. 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 Devanagari ( ; in script: , , ) is an Indic script used in the Indian subcontinent. It is a left-to-right abugida (a type of segmental Writing systems#Segmental systems: alphabets, writing system), based on the ancient ''Brāhmī script, Brā ...

conjunct र्त्स्न्य (rtsny) among the top 360 most frequent conjuncts found in

Classical Sanskrit Sanskrit (; stem form ; nominal singular , ,) is a classical language belonging to the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European languages. It arose in northwest South Asia after its predecessor languages had diffused there from the northwest ...

; the complete list appears below. Another five-letter conjunct, ङ्क्ष्ण्व (ṅkṣṇv) is possible. 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.

Biconsonantal conjuncts

The table below shows all 1296 combinations of two Sanskrit letters. The table is formed by collating the 36 consonants of Sanskrit plus (which is not used in Sanskrit), as listed in . Not all of these form conjuncts (these are represented by blank cells in the table), 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 ISO 15919 is an international standard for the romanization of Indic scripts. Published in 2001, it is part of a series of romanization standards by the International Organization for Standardization. Overview Relation to other systems ...

) and IPA of each conjunct will appear with mouseover. Conjuncts are in bold where they contradict the pattern of their row (taking letter notes into account), and are therefore irregular.

Tri-, tetra- and penta-consonantal conjuncts

Notable irregular conjuncts

Several of the ligatures for biconsonantal conjuncts are irregular; their construction is not obvious based on how Devanagari ligatures are usually formed. In

Hindi Modern Standard Hindi (, ), commonly referred to as Hindi, is the Standard language, standardised variety of the Hindustani language written in the Devanagari script. It is an official language of India, official language of the Government ...

, they are not especially widespread, but क्ष, त्र and ज्ञ appear frequently enough in common terms of Sanskrit origin that they are sometimes included in

keyboard layouts A keyboard layout is any specific physical, visual, or functional arrangement of the keys, legends, or key-meaning associations (respectively) of a computer keyboard, mobile phone, or other computer-controlled typographic keyboard. Standard keyb ...

or appended to the alphabet in learning materials. Four other conjuncts which occur in common words or religiously significant names are also listed here.

Conjuncts by frequency

These are all the conjuncts in Sanskrit which have a frequency greater than or equal to 0.010%. Of the 360, the seven notable irregulars are in green.

References

Notes

Works cited

* {{Devanagari abugida Conjunct consonant Devanagari