Not directly related to the crash, but I have a question about Telugu and similar scripts: How do their speakers think about the structure of the script? Do they consider each vowel and consonant a separate "thing" that just happens to get written as a complex grapheme, or is the grapheme the unit you think about and it just happens to be made up of smaller parts? I.e https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telugu_script#Conso…
- You normally think of clusters as single "letters". The word for them in Marathi is "joined letter". This notion of "letter" may not be totally in line with what English speakers would expect.
- You still think of clusters as having component parts that make it up. However, क्ष/ज्ञ and sometimes त्र are thought of as their own "fundamental" consonants even though they're clusters. I think folks think of things like क्र as being both -- a letter of its own, that is built up from component letters.
- Most of the clusters in Devanagari are predictable. So for any given pair you usually know how to make a "half form" for the first one and join it on, or you know how to stack them. Usually whilst reading it's obvious because you see the components; and whilst writing it's usually fine to try what makes sense.
- For unpredictable clusters, you just eventually get used to them. No different from learning that some words are spelled weirdly in English, really. Though I very much dislike ह्म , ह्य, and द्य since they're kinda confusing.
I think Bengali has a lot more unpredictable conjuncts; I stumbled across this a lot when I tried to learn the script a year ago. I suspect folks just get used to those.