Alphabet Letters
Ranjana Sa
Ranjana Letters
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Origin In use from about the eleventh century CE, in the Kathmandu Valley among the Newar people of Nepal
Sa is the thirty-second consonant of the Ranjana varnamala and the dental sibilant, the plain s of English see and the only one of the three that an English speaker produces without instruction. It is a high frequency letter in Sanskrit, carrying the nominative singular ending among much else. Ranjana was used for Sanskrit continuously in the Kathmandu Valley from about the eleventh century, and it remains in liturgical and display use in Newar Buddhism today rather than being a script of the past. Because Ranjana is not encoded in Unicode there is no code point to record for it, and the letter is shown here as a vector outline drawn from an openly licensed Ranjana typeface rather than as text.
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 dental sibilant, the plain s of English see and the only one of the three an English speaker produces without instruction. 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 PositionThirty-second of the thirty-three consonants, closing the sibilants 2Tradition: The Ranjana varnamala Attributions
Associated SoundDental sibilant, the plain s of see 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
Sa: The Ranjana Letter
Sa is the thirty second consonant of the Ranjana varnamala and the third and last of the sibilants, the dental, made with the tongue against the back of the upper teeth and air forced through the narrow channel. It is the plainest of the three to a reader of a Latin alphabet, being close to the s of English, and it is the commonest of them in Sanskrit. With it the sibilants are complete and only one letter of the chart remains. In Ranjana it is written as any consonant sign, carrying the inherent short a, hanging from the head stroke and taking its vowel marks in the four positions the script uses, and it joins with a following consonant into a stacked form where no vowel intervenes.
Sa is also among the letters most often seen in clusters, since Sanskrit combines it freely with stops and semivowels, so a reader who wants to learn the joined forms of the script will meet its reduced shapes early. Its dental articulation also places it exactly where the fourth row of the grid sits, which is the point of listing the sibilants in the order palatal, retroflex, dental: the same forward movement through the mouth that organised the stops is being used a third time, on a smaller set. Nothing in the chart's arrangement is idle.
Sa and the Chart Read as a Whole
Standing one letter from the end of the varnamala is a good place to look back at what the chart has set out. Fourteen independent vowels, arranged by position and by length and including two liquids that Sanskrit barely uses. Twenty five stops in five classes of five, each class made at one point in the mouth and closed by its own nasal, the classes running from the throat forward to the lips. Four semivowels, each paired with a vowel of the same position. Three sibilants, at three of the same five stations. And one letter still to come. Forty seven signs in total, every one of them placed by a phonetic argument rather than by convention, and the whole order taught aloud before any of it is drawn.
Ranjana inherited that structure entire from the northern Brahmic tradition and altered no part of it. What the Kathmandu Valley contributed was a hand, and the hand is what makes the script worth looking at as well as reading: heavy stems, fine joins, a strong head bar and wedge terminals, developed for writing that was meant to be seen. That division of labour is worth stating plainly at the end of the order, because it is the thing most often got wrong about the script. The analysis is South Asian and shared; the drawing is Newar and particular, and it is the drawing that a reader is looking at.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Derived From
Ranjana Sa continues the sign Brahmi Sa 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 Sa and Devanagari Sa 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.
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