Uu and the Vowel Series as a Closed Set

There are exactly as many vowels in the Ranjana varnamala as the Indian grammatical tradition recognised, and no more, which is a stronger statement than it sounds. A script that grows by accretion collects letters for the sounds its users happen to need. A script inherited with a grammatical analysis attached arrives with its inventory already decided, and the fourteen independent vowels recorded here are that inventory rather than a selection from it. This has a consequence that shows up as soon as Ranjana is used for Nepal Bhasa, the Newar language, rather than for Sanskrit. Nepal Bhasa has sounds that Sanskrit does not, and a script fitted to one language has to be stretched to write the other.

Where the stretch was made by adding a letter and where it was made by writing a conjunct is not settled for Ranjana, and the atlas records that as an open question rather than choosing an answer: six aspirated sonorants of Nepal Bhasa are drawn by the available Ranjana typefaces, and whether the Ranjana tradition counts them as letters of its own varnamala or as combinations of a base letter with ha would need a reading of the alphabet charts used to teach the script in the Valley, or of the encoding proposals put to the Unicode committee. Until then the inventory here is the one that every source agrees on.