Ranjana Ttha

Ttha is the second cell of the retroflex row, the aspirated voiceless retroflex, and it carries two distinctions at once. It is retroflex rather than dental, made with the tongue tip curled back, and it is aspirated rather than plain, released with a following puff of breath. Either distinction alone is enough to change a word, and both are marked by giving the sound its own letter rather than by modifying another. This is the point at which the economy of the Brahmic chart becomes clearest. Five points of articulation multiplied by four kinds of stop, plus a nasal for each point, produces twenty five letters from two simple dimensions, and every one of them can be located by counting. Ranjana draws all twenty five in its own hand, with the heavy stems, fine joins and wedge terminals that make the script recognisable, and places each in the position the inherited order assigns.

Nothing about the arrangement is a Newar contribution; the drawing is, and that is where the Valley's invention went. The double distinction also makes this letter a useful test of a typeface. A font that has confused its retroflex and dental rows, or its plain and aspirated columns, will show the error here first, which is one reason a chart of the full inventory is worth drawing before any of it is used.

The material a script is written on leaves its mark on the letters, and the manuscript tradition Ranjana belongs to used palm leaf for centuries before paper became usual in the Kathmandu Valley. A palm leaf page is long and narrow, is written with ink applied to the surface or incised and then inked, and splits along its fibres if a stroke cuts across them too hard. Scripts developed on that material tend towards strokes that run with the grain and away from long unsupported horizontals, and the strong head bar of the northern Brahmic scripts is often explained in part by the constraints of the writing surface and the tools used on it.

Ranjana's own combination of a heavy bar with fine connecting strokes and a vertical emphasis belongs to that inheritance, developed further into an ornamental hand once the script's principal work was display writing rather than running text. Paper changed what was possible and did not change the letterforms much, because by then the shapes carried the authority of the tradition, and a display hand is valued for looking like itself. The change of material also changed the shape of the page rather than the shapes on it. Paper allowed a taller format and longer lines, and the ornamental use of Ranjana on covers and headings suited that better than the narrow palm leaf strip had.