Well the Hindi alphabet has 52 letters with 28 "pure" consonants (which multiply with some modifiers). See here: http://www.omniglot.com/writing/hindi.htm http:

Well the Hindi alphabet has 52 letters with 28 "pure" consonants (which multiply with some modifiers). See here: http://www.omniglot.com/writing/hindi.htm http://www.omniglot.com/writing/hindi.htm Some other Indian languages have additional consonants that are not familiar to predominantly Hindi speakers. The key thing is that the written alphabet seems to have been designed to accurately represent all of those sounds. It's hard (actually impossible) to map all these to Roman alphabet.