Tremel's list makes more sense to me, based on his sources, although this too contains some loan words and, importantly in terms of glyph set design, includes large numbers of conjuncts that almost all Hindi writers would instead write with anusvara, e.g. संख्या instead of सङ्ख्या.   [John Hudson][comment]

Here is a note concerning writing standards for Nepali Wikipedia:

Don't replace ङ् with an ं in the middle of word as in Hindi, use like this शङ्कर not शंकर

Indeed, Maxim. And limiting the name of a typeface to a particular language then limits ones ability to extend the language support of that type in future. Adobe Devanagari is a type that in its current version, as intended, supports modern Hindi usage. I think it highly likely that future versions will support Marathi and Nepali. Whether it will ever support a full range of Sanskrit typography, even Vedic, isn't obvious to me.

While the concept that there are different conjunct representations appropriate to different languages is sound, I think some of the LaTex choices in this regard are questionable. In the illustration you show, I'd say all the 'Sanskrit' ligature forms would be reasonable to use for Hindi and, indeed, are found in plenty of Hindi publishing; there are other Sanskrit ligatures that are not. What LaTeX categorises as 'Modern Hindi' seems to me to represent particular technological limitations of some obsolete typesetting technology that needed to rely on half forms, post forms and explicit halant. I don't think there's anything particularly 'modern' about it; indeed, it now looks to me old fashioned, like the non-kerning f of old Linotype faces.

Yes, some conjuncts can be created from sequences of so-called half forms, and the OpenType Layout model for Devanagari enables this. [Unicode also provides a control character mechanism to force half forms if supported by the font; this can be used to override vertical conjuncts with horizontal layout.] If the sequences of half form(s) and full form are carefully kerned in the font, the result can be really quite acceptable. Quite a lot of rare conjuncts are displayed in this way with the Adobe Devanagari fonts, and one can't easily tell from the resulting typeform that one is looking at a half form sequence instead of a ligature (until, that is, one enters an ikar after them, because the variant width ikar selection currently only works with ligatures).

Now, all that said, in some conjuncts, especially wide ones, a subtle reduction in the width of the component letters is desirable, and then in some cases modification of stroke weights to maintain an even colour on the page. Or some form of optical correction of overlapping segments might be desirable. So half form sequences are not always the way to go.

[As noted in this other thread, the Linotype hot metal composing method formed many individual letters from combinations of half form and long a vowel sign.]

Uli: Such a two-halves font requires extremely meticulous planning, though.

Yes, and usually require careful kerning too. We've made use of contextual variant half and post (conjunct-final) forms in some fonts.

I'm in the process of rationalising the glyph set for a new Hindi font, and am removing a good number of the transliteration ligatures that we included in Adobe Devanagari (most of which can be shaped with half forms anyway) and adding some more vertical ligatures to cover Sanskrit quoted words without explicit halant.

[Wandering off-topic.]

Arabic was shown with more than four forms of each letter

As is entirely normal. To my knowledge, there is not a single Arabic or Persian work on Arabic writing that uses the 'four-forms-per-letter' analysis. It is a European misconception, most likely introduced by Biblical scholars whose prior knowledge was of Syriac (for which the analysis makes sense). Arabic and Persian scribes would never have made that error, because they would be aware that there was no attested style of Arabic writing for which the four-form analysis is true, not even the most geometric 'kufi'. Unfortunately, it is an error that persists in almost all introductory grammars of Arabic in English, and forms the basis OpenType Arabic shaping model, which requires letters to be mapped to initial, medial and final forms before one can apply the actual joining rules of the script or of particular styles.

Mr. Hudson:

"ब्न | dBNa | Coulson"

The Agenbroad collection is "old hat" to me.

In my comprehensive book "Conjuncts Consonants in Sanskrit", which is an unpublished work according to German Copyright Law and according to the Revised Berne Convention and which I cannot yet make available to others prior to publication, I wrote this on the invented ligature "bn":

"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"."

If you search for "bn" in the huge Sanskrit dictionary file

http://www.sanskritweb.net/sansdocs/reverse1.pdf

you will not find any Sanskrit words containing "bn"

Since Sanskrit words with "bn" are non-existant, it does not make much sense to design the ligature "bn" for a Sanskrit font, because this ligature will never be used on account of the fact that Sanskrit words with "bn" do not exist.

More than 300 of the approx. 1000 conjunct consonants, i.e. roughly 30% of the collection by Agenbroad, are entirely fictitious, as far as Sanskrit is concerned.

Some of these 300 ligatures compiled by Mr. Agenbroad may occur in foreign-language loan words in Hindi and Marathi texts, but they definitely do not occur in ancient Sanskrit texts. That is for sure.

In the funny book "Spoken Sanskrit" edited by S. S. Janaki and published by the Kuppuswami Sastri Research Institute in 1990, you will find a fictitious Sanskrit report on a tennis match at Wimbledon between Björn Borg and John McEnroe.

For typesetting the name "Wimbledon" in Devanagari, you could invent the ligature "mbl", and in fact, this invented ligature is contained in the Agenbroad collection and also contained in the book by Mariano Rampolla del Tindaro, Lingua Sanscrita, Romae 1936. But this does not mean that this entirely fictitious ligature "mbl" will ever be required for typesetting an ancient Sanskrit text, since there never existed a Sanskrit word containing "mbl". This is a fact which you can check yourself here:

www.sanskritweb.net/sansdocs/reverse1.pdf

or here:

www.sanskrit-lexicon.uni-koeln.de/scans/MWScan/tamil/index.html

Do substring search for "bn" and "mbl" on Cologne Digital Sanskrit Lexicon (166,434 entries). You will get no hits at all for these entirely fictitious ligatures.

So, why should you care to design fictitious ligatures for fictitious Sanskrit words?

Note:

The "Samyoga table" mentioned by Mr. Hudson is downloadable here

http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/language/sanskrit as file sktdoc.ps

If you convert this ps file to a pdf file, it will be searchable.

Thank you for the detailed response, Uli. I had assumed that at least some of the Samyoga Table entries were 'fictitious', to use your term, either the result of loan words in Devanagari contexts that were not limited to Sanskrit, or of misreadings of manuscripts or poorly proofread texts. But you can perhaps appreciate my concern, as a non-Sanskritist, to find so many questionable entries. Thankfully, on my current project I have a number of Sanskritists to whom I will eventually be able to submit my Sanskrit glyph set for review. And I do plan to double-check against the Cologne Lexicon; thank you for this suggestion.

Mr. Hudson:

My own PDF file

http://www.sanskritweb.net/sansdocs/reverse1.pdf

is case-sensitive, if you activate case-sensitivity in Adobe Acrobat.

Furthermore the old program by Louis Bontes

http://members.chello.nl/l.bontes/mwsdd.gif
http://members.chello.nl/l.bontes/sans_n.htm

is also case-sensitive, as far as I remember.

Mr. Hudson:

My answers to your questions are at the end of each line after ---

1 च्न cn in हस्तिकच्नि hastikacni (a kind of bulbous plant L.) --- scanning error of हस्तिकन्द
1 ज्द jd in भुज्दृश् bhujdRz (or mfn. accompanied by distortion of the eyes (as a fever) Bhpr.) --- scanning error of भुग्न-दृश्
4 ज्न jn as in अरसज्न arasajna (mfn. having no taste for , not taking interest in MBh. xii , 6719) --- scanning error of अरस-ज्ञ
2 झ्य jhy as in झ्यु jhyu (cl. 1. A1. v.l. for %{jyu}.) --- jhyu and jyu are listed in the Dhatupada 22, 60, but are not attested in any real texts.
9 द्ब्र dbr as in सद्ब्रह्मन् sadbrahman (n. the true Brahman ib.) --- attested conjunct, frequency 0.277%, i.e. very frequent and included in my frequency list
1 न्त्स nts in अनश्नन्त्साङ्गमन anaznantsAGgamana (m. the sacrificial fire in the Sabha1 ... S3Br.) --- an-aznan-t-sAGgamana is formed by n+"t"+s and is contained in my frequency list as a peculiar Vedic sandhi in the Shatapatha-Brahmana. In other Sanskrit texts, n+s is used instead of n+"t"+s, i.e. "t" is not inserted.
4 ल्ज lj as in पश्चाल्जन pazcAljana (m. Pa1n2. the people in the west Var) --- scanning error of पञ्चाल-जन
1 ल्स ls in अतिपेशल्स् atipezals (mfn. very dexterous.) --- scanning error of अति-पेशल
12 ष्ट्व STv as in हविष्ट्व haviSTva (n. the being an oblation Nya1yam. Sch.) --- "STv" is extremely frequent (1.405%) and of course included in my frequency list
35 स्त्व stv as in अनागास्त्व anAgAstva (n. sinlessness RV.) --- "stv" is also extremely frequent (1.339%) and of course included in my frequency list

I am under the impression that you changed your mind and that you now intend to include into the Adobe Devanagari font even the most exotic conjuncts. Nobody would search for "ls", because this combination is impossible in Sanskrit. And as regards "nts", it is an odd peculiarity in some Brahmana manuscripts and hence should only be included into the most specialized Sanskrit fonts.

@John Hudson:
The number of scanning errors in the Cologne lexicon is alarming.

But hardly unexpected. Most OCR software is oriented around the Latin alphabet, as it lends itself better to that process, and the humans available to check the results would presumably have been native speakers of German (or possibly French, Köln not being too far from the border, as its English name attests) rather than Hindi, let alone Sanskrit.

We have to count ourselves lucky that a thing like the Cologne lexicon even exists, even though its imperfections certainly do need to be remedied.

The report doesn't seem to discuss ligatures, and it seems to come from a stage in the project when that issue did not arise, as a dictionary where the Sanskrit words were all in Latin transliteration was the one used.

Of course, I see your point that my comments were misguided, then, as the excuses I advanced did not apply, and the dictionary ought to be a more accurate source of information on what consonant clusters exist in Sanskrit (if not on how they're written in Devanagari).

Mr. Hudson:

Having stated above on 4 Sep 2012:

"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"."

it seems to me that you and Mrs. Fiona are trying to find an attestation for the ligature "bn" in Sanskrit in order to prove that I am wrong.

I should like to mention that you are not the first ones who tried to do that.

However, it seems to me that Mrs. Fiona did not learn Sanskrit, otherwise she would not have said that

अब्नाभः ="abnābhaḥ"

was given in the Monier-Williams dictionary. The usage of this dictionary is tricky and error-prone for non-Sanskritists. On page 60, middle column, the main entry starts with "ab-ja" which is a compound in itself composed of "ab" (from "ap") + "ja". A few lines below, you see "-nābha" (and also "-netra").

The compound here must be build as "abja-nābha", and not as "ab-nābha", as was thought by Mrs. Fiona. But the correct compound "abja-nābha" does not contain the ligature "bn".

Theoretically or "exempli gratia" or "just for fun", it would be possible to construct a Sanskrit compound word containing the ligature "bn", for example the compound

अब्निर्वाण (= abnirvāṇa = "the nirvana in the water")

invented by me here exempli gratia. But you will never find any attestation for this compound.

I do not deny that it is theoretically possible to find the combination "bn" in any old Sanskrit text, but none was found so far.

The statistics mathematician and font lover Luc Devroye would say that from the probability point of view, the mathematical likelihood that a Sanskritist will ever need the ligature "bn" in a font for typesetting a real Sanskrit word is converging to "zero", "nil" or "nought".

For example, by analyzing Panini's grammar, I found exactly 114 additional artificial ligatures pertaining to Panini's acronym-like grammatical elements. But I included none of these artificial acronym ligatures into my official ligature list here

http://www.sanskritweb.net/itrans/itmanual2003.pdf (page 29 seq.)

because none of these artificial acronym-like ligatures could be found in any ordinary Sanskrit text.

Additional note for scholars: "abja-nābha" occurs in the Bhagavata-Purana repeatedly. Hence it is an attested compound word.

Mr. Hudson:

> I will write to James Agenbroad, whom I know from Unicode circles

I would be pleased, if you could pass along my best wishes to Mr. Agenbroad.

I looked up my old files and saw that ten years ago, he send me by airmail his "Difficult Characters" list, which he published in 1991 in the Bulletin 38 of the International Association of Orientalist Librarians.

I hope, Mr. Agenbroad is in good health and that he is enjoying his retirement.

Tell him that my comprehensive Sanskrit handbook is now in its fifth edition.

Uli, I am certainly not setting out to prove that you are wrong. And neither I nor Fiona singled out the bn conjunct ligature for attention. I am whittling away at a list of dubious conjuncts and this one happened to be unique in that we found it used in Lambert's book and apparently in Monier-Williams, and I posted a message about it here not to prove you wrong but because I wanted your opinion on it. Why? Because I value your opinion on matters Sanskrit, and you can usually explain oddities in a reasonable and convincing manner. In other words, I asked because I consider you likely to be right, not wrong.

One of the things I have noticed is that grammars of the writing of Sanskrit, from Panini onwards, have a tendency to fill out, to variable degrees, the possibilities of the writing system independent of its application to the actual language.

In this way, the high degree of order and rationality of the Sanskrit grammar and sandhi strikes me as akin to the Periodic Table of the elements in that it seems to hypothesize and predict specific possibilities that do not however exist naturally — only in the laboratory environment and for short durations. ;-)