Alphabet Letters
Ranjana Ddha
Ranjana Letters
Citation Formats
General Reference
APA Style
BibTeX
Origin In use from about the eleventh century CE, in the Kathmandu Valley among the Newar people of Nepal
Ddha is the fourteenth consonant of the Ranjana varnamala, the voiced aspirate of the retroflex class, and it is among the rarest letters in ordinary Sanskrit text. It has a place in the table for the same reason jha and vocalic ll do: the varnamala is a systematic grid and its symmetry is part of what makes it teachable. Ranjana carries every cell of that grid, which is one of the ways a script's descent from Brahmi is recognised even when its letterforms look nothing like their ancestors. Ranjana remains unencoded in Unicode, so the letter cannot be stored as a character; what is shown is a vector outline taken from an openly licensed Ranjana typeface.
Facts
Origins
Origin PeriodIn use from about the eleventh century CE, in the Kathmandu Valley among the Newar people of Nepal 2 Place of OriginThe Kathmandu Valley, among the Newar people of Nepal, in use from about the eleventh century CE 2Tradition: Newar manuscript culture Origin of the NameNamed by its own sound. Ranjana letter names are the sound itself, unlike the Greek and Semitic names, which are borrowed words. 2 Sense of the NameThe voiced aspirate of the retroflex class, among the rarest letters in ordinary Sanskrit text. 2 Identity
Script TypeConsonant sign of a Brahmi-derived abugida; it carries the inherent short a unless a dependent vowel sign is written 1Tradition: Brahmic writing PositionFourteenth of the thirty-three consonants, the voiced aspirate of the retroflex varga 2Tradition: The Ranjana varnamala Attributions
Associated SoundVoiced aspirated retroflex stop; among the rarest letters in ordinary Sanskrit text 2Tradition: Sanskrit phonetics of the grammarians Attestation
Meaning in the Attesting SourceRanjana has no Unicode allocation; the Newa block U+11400 to U+1147F encodes Prachalit or Newar, a different script used for the same two languages 3Tradition: Digital text encoding Learn More
Ddha: The Ranjana Letter
Ddha is the fourth cell of the retroflex row, the voiced aspirate retroflex, and it combines the two features that make the Indo-Aryan stop system unusual. It is retroflex, made with the tongue tip curled back, and it is a voiced aspirate, produced with the vocal folds vibrating through the closure and a breathy release after it. Neither feature is common among the world's languages and the combination is rarer still, so this cell of the chart is one of the places where the Brahmic scripts record something that most writing systems have never needed to record. Its frequency in Sanskrit is low, which does not affect its place: the grid is filled by principle.
Ranjana inherits the letter, draws it in the ornamental hand of the Kathmandu Valley, and treats it exactly as it treats its neighbours, with the inherent short a, the head stroke, the four positions for vowel marks and the ability to enter a joined form with a following consonant. The rarity of the sound is also why its letter is a good test of whether a chart is complete. A chart drawn from what a scribe actually needed would be likely to drop it; a chart drawn from the tradition's analysis keeps it, and every Brahmic chart keeps it, which tells you which kind of document these charts are.
Ddha and the Names of the Letters
There is a habit of reading letter names as words, and it comes from the Semitic scripts, where the name of a letter is often an ordinary noun and the letter's ancestor was a picture of that thing. Aleph names an ox; beth names a house. Brahmic letter names do not work that way, and expecting them to leads a reader astray. The name of this letter is the sound it writes with the inherent vowel attached, spoken as a syllable, and that is all it is. The same holds throughout the chart: a Ranjana letter is named by saying it. This is worth stating plainly because the difference is a difference of kind and not of degree.
In a Semitic script the name preserves a memory of a picture and invites reconstruction of what the picture was. In a Brahmic script the name is a phonetic label attached to a cell of a grid, and there is no picture behind it to recover. What a Ranjana letter name tells you is its sound and its position in the order, which is genuinely useful information and not a lesser kind of meaning. The difference has a practical edge for this atlas. Where a Semitic letter carries a gloss that is a modern reconstruction and is marked as such, a Brahmic letter carries a plain statement of its sound and its place in the order, and adding a reconstruction caveat to it would assert a doubt that nobody holds.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Derived From
Ranjana Ddha continues the sign Brahmi Ddha writes in the same place of the inherited varnamala. The descent is not direct: it runs through the Gupta and Siddhamatrka stages of the northern Brahmi line and then the scripts of Nepal, and it is stated from position in the order rather than from shape.
Related To
Ranjana Ddha and Devanagari Ddha hold the same position in the inherited varnamala and write the same sound, as separate northern Brahmi descendants rather than as variants of one script. Devanagari is the relative most readers know, so the two charts can be read against each other.
Sources
Reader Challenges (0 open reader challenges)
No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.
Sign in to dispute this or suggest a correction.
View At A Past Year
The atlas records no dated fact of its own for this entry, so there is no other year to choose.