Ya: The Ranjana Letter

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.