Vocalic R: The Ranjana Letter

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.