Ranjana Au

Au is the fourteenth letter of the Ranjana varnamala and the last of the independent vowels, the open counterpart of o in the same way that ai is the open counterpart of e. The grammatical analysis derives it from a combining with the longer vowels of the labial group, which makes it the fuller of the pair, and in the classical pronunciation it is a long vowel of the back of the mouth, more open than o. Like the other three compound vowels it has no short partner. Its mark is written above the head stroke and is distinguished from the mark for o by shape; the independent letter shown here is used where the vowel begins a word.

With au the vowel section of the chart closes, and the consonants begin. That division is the largest structural break in the varnamala, and it is marked in every teaching of the order: the vowels are recited as one block and the consonants as another, and the two are counted separately, fourteen and thirty three in the series recorded here. Au is also the least common of the four compound vowels in ordinary Sanskrit text, appearing chiefly in derived forms and in the results of certain word junctions rather than in common roots. A scribe would draw its mark far less often than the mark for o. Its place at the close of the vowels is nonetheless fixed, because the order runs from the simple to the compound and within the compounds from the closer to the more open, and au is the last cell of that arrangement. Ranjana keeps the arrangement without alteration, as it keeps the rest.

The point where a varnamala stops listing vowels and begins listing consonants is where the chart changes its organising principle, and it is worth pausing on. The vowels were ordered by position and by length, in pairs, along a single line of description. The consonants that follow are ordered in a grid: five classes of five, each class made at one point in the mouth, each running through the same four kinds of stop before closing on its own nasal, and the classes themselves running from the back of the mouth forward to the lips. After the grid come the four semivowels, the three sibilants and the aspirate, which do not fit the pattern of stops and are listed after it.

A reader who understands that turn can predict the whole second half of the chart from its first row, which is the practical genius of the arrangement and the reason the order has survived unchanged across a script family that spans two thousand years and several dozen writing systems. Ranjana inherits the grid whole, and gives it an ornamental hand of the Kathmandu Valley rather than altering a single position in it. The turn also changes what the letters do on the page. A vowel of the series is written in full only when nothing precedes it, so the fourteen independent vowels are the smaller half of the chart in use as well as in count; the thirty three consonants carry almost every syllable, with the vowels reduced to marks around them. Anyone reading a page of Ranjana is therefore reading the second half of the chart nearly all of the time, and meeting the first half mainly at the openings of words.