Ranjana Vocalic R

Vocalic r is the seventh letter of the Ranjana varnamala and the first of a small group that the Indian analysis places among the vowels for a structural reason rather than an acoustic one. A vowel, in that analysis, is the sound that carries a syllable, and a syllabic r does exactly that: it takes the weight of a syllable with no other vowel present. English has the same thing without a letter for it, in the second syllable of butter or the middle of a quickly spoken interesting, but English treats it as a variant of r and Sanskrit treats it as a vowel in its own right, subject to the same rules of length and of alternation as the others. Its written form follows the pattern of the rest of the series: an independent letter, shown here, for the head of a word, and an attached mark for the syllable where it follows a consonant.

The mark is written beneath the consonant. Placing the letter among the vowels rather than the consonants is not a detail of shelving. It determines which grammatical rules apply to it, and it is the reason the script's chart of vowels has ten entries before the compound vowels begin rather than the six a European reader would expect. The classification also decides how the sound behaves when words meet. Sanskrit joins its words by rule rather than by habit, and a vocalic r at a junction is altered by the rules that govern vowels, not by those that govern consonants, so the letter's place on the chart is a statement about grammar as much as about pronunciation. A script that inherits the chart inherits that statement with it.

The vocalic liquids are the clearest evidence that Ranjana did not develop its inventory from the language spoken around it. Nepal Bhasa, the language of the Newar people, is Tibeto-Burman and has no syllabic r of this kind; Sanskrit, which Ranjana was chiefly used to write in the Kathmandu Valley, has one and uses it in some of its commonest words, including the name of the Rigveda. The letter is in the script because the whole varnamala came into the Valley as a unit, with its order, its classification and its grammatical apparatus attached, and a script family that arrives that way keeps its full inventory whether the local language needs it or not. That is worth stating plainly because it explains something about how these scripts behave.

Letters that a language does not use are not quietly dropped; they are taught, drawn on charts, and kept in the recitation, and they surface whenever a Sanskrit word is quoted or a mantra is written. For Ranjana the Sanskrit case is not marginal but central, since the script's principal work in Newar Buddhism was the copying of Sanskrit scripture and the writing of Sanskrit mantras, so a letter that is unnecessary for the local vernacular is unremarkable in the material the script actually carried.