Ranjana Ya

Ya is the twenty sixth consonant of the Ranjana varnamala and the first of the four semivowels, which the chart lists after the grid of twenty five stops because they do not belong in it. A stop is made by closing the vocal tract and releasing it; a semivowel is made with the tract open, narrowed enough to produce friction of a kind but never closed, so no column of the grid can describe one. The tradition treats the four as a group of their own, and pairs each with a vowel of the same position: ya with the palatal i, ra with the vocalic r, la with the vocalic l, and va with the labial u. That pairing is not a mnemonic but a statement about the grammar, since Sanskrit turns one into the other under stated conditions when words or elements of words are joined.

In Ranjana Ya is written as any consonant sign is written, carrying the inherent short a, hanging from the head stroke and taking its vowel marks in the four positions the script uses. It also enters joined forms, and in the northern scripts a following ya is one of the commoner second elements of a conjunct. The pairing with i also has a visible consequence in the writing. Because the vowel and the semivowel alternate under rule, a reader who meets an unexpected ya in a word can often account for it by the grammar rather than by the spelling, which is the same economy the retroflex nasal rule provides elsewhere in the chart. A system stated in terms of position rather than of individual words is one a scribe can apply rather than merely remember.

The eight letters that follow the five classes are the part of a Brahmic chart where the arrangement stops being derivable and has to be learnt. Four semivowels, three sibilants and the aspirate, in that order, with no rows or columns to count from. This is worth noticing because the contrast with the grid explains something about the chart as a whole. The tradition arranged what could be arranged and listed the rest, rather than forcing every sound into a scheme that did not fit it, which is a mark of a description made honestly.

For a reader of Ranjana specifically it has a practical consequence: correspondences between Ranjana and its relatives are most secure inside the grid, where a cell can be identified by counting, and require more care outside it, where the order is a list. The atlas states its Ranjana correspondences on that basis. A Ranjana letter and its Devanagari or Brahmi counterpart occupy the same position in the same inherited series, and for the letters after the grid that position is a place in a fixed list rather than a coordinate, which is a slightly weaker but still perfectly checkable kind of fact. The point applies to any letter list of this kind. Where an order is derivable it can be checked; where it is a list it has to be attested, and saying which is which is part of recording it honestly.