3/30/2020 Sanskrit Documents

Conjunct Consonants in Sanskrit

(Konsonantenverbindungen in Sanskrit)

In 1991, James E. Agenbroad published his collection "Difficult characters: A collection of Devanagari
conjunct consonants and consonant + vowel matra combinations". Agenbroad's collection is a
compilation of 1018 combinations (mainly conjunct consonants and a few matra combinations) quoted
from various other books. Yet, more than 300 of the approx. 1000 conjunct consonants, i.e. roughly
30% of the collection by Agenbroad, are entirely fictitious. These hundreds of conjunct consonants
were invented by modern Sanskritists such as Wilson, Monier-Williams, Gonda, Lambert, etc. etc. in
the same strange and unscientific manner as ancient Sanskritists such as Panini invented hundreds of
verbal roots.

Example: Charles Wilkins (1808), Alix Desgranges (1845), M.R. Kale (1894), Richard Fick (1922), A.A.
MacDonell (1926), H.M. Lambert (1953), Michael Coulson (1973) and Madhav M. Deshpande (1997)
invented the conjunct consonant "bn". If "bn" were no invention, then a Sanskrit word would exist
containing "bn". But there does not exist any such Sanskrit word. Therefore "bn" has been invented.
Yet "bn" could occur in a foreign-language word, e.g. in "abnormal", inserted into Neo-Sanskrit texts.
But serious scientific research on Sanskrit conjunct consonants must dismiss such "abnormalities".

The book Conjunct Consonants in Sanskrit (see Preview) is the first scientific treatise which does not
invent conjunct consonants, but proves which conjunct consonants really occur in original Sanskrit
texts. This scholarly treatise designed for linguists and typographers contains comprehensive statistics
of conjunct consonants of the Sanskrit language, sorted by alphabet and by frequency with quotations
from original Sanskrit texts. Based on these statistics, font designers can decide which ligatures they
should include into their Devanagari fonts for typesetting Sanskrit texts.

www.sanskritweb.net/sansdocs/#CONJUNCTS 1/1