Ranjana Na

Na is the fifth and last cell of the dental row, the nasal made at the teeth. It is the commonest of the five class nasals in Sanskrit and the one that stands closest to the n of English, so a reader arriving from a Latin alphabet finds it the most familiar letter in the nasal column. Its distinction from the retroflex nasal of the row above is real and does separate words, and a rule of Sanskrit converts one into the other under stated conditions, which the grammatical tradition describes carefully. With Na the fourth class is complete and only the labials remain, so a learner reaching this point has covered twenty of the twenty five stops and has seen the pattern four times.

Ranjana writes the letter as any consonant, with the inherent short a and the head bar, taking vowel marks around it and joining with a following consonant where no vowel intervenes. The letter is also a reminder that familiarity can mislead. The nasal that looks most like an English n is a dental made against the teeth rather than the alveolar n of English, so even the easiest correspondence in the chart is an approximation, and the same caution applies to every letter in it. What the chart states exactly is a position, and the position is what a reader should trust.

The deepest difference between a Brahmic script and an alphabet is not the marks or the conjuncts but what the writing is a record of. An alphabet records a sequence of segments and leaves the syllable to be inferred. An abugida records syllables, and the marks and joins are the machinery by which a syllable is assembled on the page. This is why a Ranjana line reads as a row of clusters rather than a row of letters, why a vowel mark can appear to the left of the consonant it follows, and why two consonants without a vowel between them have to be drawn as one joined form: each of those features exists to keep the written unit and the spoken unit aligned. It also explains why the order of the chart is phonetic.

A system that writes syllables benefits from a classification of the sounds that make them, and the varnamala supplies one. Ranjana inherits the whole of that arrangement, including the machinery, and its contribution is a way of drawing it that is heavier, more contrasted and more suited to display than most of its relatives. That alignment is also why these scripts handle a change of language relatively well. A syllable is a syllable in any language, so a Brahmic script fitted to Sanskrit can be turned to a quite different language with adjustments at the edges rather than a redesign, which is what happened when Ranjana was used for Nepal Bhasa.