Ranjana I

I is the short palatal vowel, made with the front of the tongue raised towards the hard palate and the lips spread, and it is the third letter of the Ranjana order. Its place in the sequence follows the same logic that put a first. Having begun with the vowel of least effort, the series moves through the positions the tongue can take, and the palatal position is the next one described.

The classification matters beyond the vowel itself, because Sanskrit grammar treats i as the vowel that corresponds to the semivowel ya and to the whole palatal class of consonants, and states rules by which one alternates with another. A vowel is therefore not an isolated sound in this analysis but a member of a family that includes consonants. In writing, i has the property that most often catches out a reader coming from a Latin background: its mark is drawn before the consonant it follows. The sound comes after the consonant and the sign comes before it, so the scribe writes the mark and then the letter it belongs to, and the reader reverses the order when speaking. This is inherited from the wider Indian tradition rather than invented for Ranjana, and it is one of the reasons an abugida cannot be read as a simple left to right sequence of sounds.

The i mark's habit of standing to the left of its consonant is a small thing that has large consequences, and it is worth following them out. For a scribe it means the hand has to know the whole syllable before it commits the first stroke, because the mark cannot be added afterwards without crowding. For a typesetter it means the sequence in which the sorts are set is not the sequence in which the sounds are said, which is one of the reasons Indian scripts were slow and expensive to cut in metal. For a computer it means that the order in which characters are stored and the order in which they are drawn are different problems, and every modern rendering engine for Brahmic scripts has to carry logic that reorders a mark like this one before it can put a syllable on a screen.

Ranjana adds a further difficulty of its own, because it has no Unicode allocation at all, so there is no standard sequence for anything in it to be reordered from. Text that appears to be Ranjana on a screen today is usually Devanagari or Newa characters displayed through a Ranjana typeface, a workaround that gets the shapes onto a page and stores something other than what is shown. That is worth knowing when a reader meets the script online, because the letter they see and the letter the file holds may not be the same letter at all.