Ranjana Bha

Bha is the fourth cell of the labial row, the voiced aspirate labial, made with the lips closed, the vocal folds vibrating through the closure and a breathy release after it. It is the last of the five voiced aspirates, one at each point of articulation, and it is reasonably common in Sanskrit, appearing in a number of frequent roots. With it the fourth column of the grid is complete. The romanisation bh attracts the same misreading as the other aspirates, since English uses h to make a fricative and here it marks a manner of release.

In Ranjana the letter is written as any consonant, with the inherent short a and the head bar, and it takes vowel marks and enters conjuncts on the same terms as its neighbours. Its position closes the pattern of voiced aspirates that runs down the fourth column of the chart, and a reciter reaching it has said all five and is one letter from the end of the twenty five stops. The letter also appears in a good deal of religious vocabulary, so it is among the shapes a reader will meet early when looking at Ranjana in the settings where the script is most often found, on covers, in title lines and in the writing set apart from a text. Its position is also the last that can be reached by the simple rule of counting columns, because the fifth column of the grid holds the nasals and the letters after the grid are not arranged in columns at all. Bha is therefore the end of the part of the chart a learner can derive rather than memorise.

Reading a varnamala down its columns rather than across its rows is a useful exercise, and the fourth column is the most instructive. It contains five letters, one at each point of articulation, for a class of sound that most of the world's languages do not have at all: the voiced aspirate, produced with voicing through the closure and a breathy release. Their presence in the chart is a statement about the language the chart was built for, and their retention in every descendant script is a statement about how these systems are transmitted. A script family that inherits a chart rather than assembling one keeps the whole of it.

Ranjana, at the far northern edge of that family and used chiefly for Sanskrit in a valley whose own language is Tibeto-Burman, carries all five voiced aspirates because the chart carries them. The same logic explains the retroflex row, the vocalic liquids among the vowels and the rare letters nobody writes. What is inherited is not a set of useful signs but a description of a language, and a description is kept complete or it stops being one. Reading down the other columns is worth the same effort. The nasal column shows five sounds distinguished only by where they are made; the plain voiceless column shows the five stations of the mouth stripped of every other feature. Each column is a demonstration of one variable held constant.