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, etc to write consonant clusters such as or . Although most of the time, letters are formed ...

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 æ and œ used in English and French, in which the letters 'a' and 'e' are joined for the first ...

characteristic of the

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

. 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 ( ; , , Sanskrit pronunciation: ), also called Nagari (),Kathleen Kuiper (2010), The Culture of India, New York: The Rosen Publishing Group, , page 83 is a left-to-right abugida (a type of segmental Writing systems#Segmental syste ...

conjunct among the top 360 most frequent conjuncts found in Classical Sanskrit; the complete list appears below. 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 instead show a

halanta Virama ( ्) is a Sanskrit phonological concept to suppress the inherent vowel that otherwise occurs with every consonant letter, commonly used as a generic term for a codepoint in Unicode, representing either # halanta, hasanta or explicit virā ...

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 ISO 15919 (Transliteration of Devanagari and related Indic scripts into Latin characters) is one of a series of international standards for romanization by the International Organization for Standardization. It was published in 2001 and uses dia ...

The romanization shown is identical to

IAST The International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration (IAST) is a transliteration scheme that allows the lossless romanisation of Indic scripts as employed by Sanskrit and related Indic languages. It is based on a scheme that emerged during ...

, except that has the ISO value ḷ, whereas IAST duplicates l for it.) and IPA of each conjunct will appear with mouseover.

Biconsonantal conjuncts

Tri- and tetra-consonantal conjuncts

Most frequent conjuncts

References

Works cited