Alphabet Letters
Ranjana Cha
Ranjana Letters
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Origin In use from about the eleventh century CE, in the Kathmandu Valley among the Newar people of Nepal
Cha is the seventh consonant of the Ranjana varnamala and the aspirated partner of ca. The h in its transliteration marks aspiration and never a fricative, a convention that runs through the romanisation of every Indian script and accounts equally for kha, gha, tha and pha. Ranjana's own tradition does not use roman transliteration at all: the letters are learnt by their sounds in recitation, and the romanised names used in a catalogue such as this one are a modern convenience rather than a Newar practice. Ranjana has no Unicode allocation, so this entry stores no character; the form shown is a vector outline of the letter, taken from an openly licensed Ranjana typeface.
Facts
Origins
Origin PeriodIn use from about the eleventh century CE, in the Kathmandu Valley among the Newar people of Nepal 2 Place of OriginThe Kathmandu Valley, among the Newar people of Nepal, in use from about the eleventh century CE 2Tradition: Newar manuscript culture Origin of the NameNamed by its own sound. Ranjana letter names are the sound itself, unlike the Greek and Semitic names, which are borrowed words. 2 Sense of the NameThe aspirated partner of ca. 2 Identity
Script TypeConsonant sign of a Brahmi-derived abugida; it carries the inherent short a unless a dependent vowel sign is written 1Tradition: Brahmic writing PositionSeventh of the thirty-three consonants, the aspirated member of the palatal varga 2Tradition: The Ranjana varnamala Attributions
Associated SoundVoiceless aspirated palatal affricate 2Tradition: Sanskrit phonetics of the grammarians Attestation
Meaning in the Attesting SourceRanjana has no Unicode allocation; the Newa block U+11400 to U+1147F encodes Prachalit or Newar, a different script used for the same two languages 3Tradition: Digital text encoding Learn More
Cha: The Ranjana Letter
Cha is the second cell of the palatal row, the aspirated counterpart of Ca. As with the velars, the aspiration is a distinct consonant rather than a variant pronunciation, and the two letters are as separate in the chart and in the mind of a reader as any other pair. The palatals are affricates, so the aspirated member is heard as a ch with a following release of breath, and the difference between it and its plain partner is one that a speaker of a language without the contrast must be taught to hear. Every row of the grid carries the same pair in the same columns, so a learner meets the pattern five times and needs to learn only the shapes.
In Ranjana the shape is distinct rather than derived, following the family rule that an aspirate has its own letter rather than a diacritic. The script's heavy vertical stems and fine connecting strokes give each of these letters a strong outline, which is what a display hand needs, since a letter read from a lintel or a book cover has to be identified from its silhouette rather than from its detail. There is a further reason the family gave aspirates their own letters rather than a mark. A diacritic can be lost in a hurried copy or a worn page, and losing one here would turn one word into another; a whole shape is far harder to lose without the loss being obvious. Redundancy of that kind is a virtue in a manuscript tradition.
Cha and the Hand That Was Made to Be Seen
Ranjana is best understood as a hand for looking at. Its distinguishing features are all features of appearance: a strong horizontal head stroke, a marked contrast between thick and thin strokes, wedge shaped terminals, and a vertical emphasis that makes a line of it read as a row of upright blocks beneath a ruled bar. Those are the qualities that make a script suitable for a title or a carved panel, and they are the qualities that carried it out of the Kathmandu Valley into Tibetan use, where it is known as Lantsa and appears on temple lintels, book covers, the borders of painted works and other places where a Sanskrit syllable had to be both correct and impressive. What travels in those settings is the writing.
The practice attached to the syllables it writes belongs to living traditions and is transmitted under initiation, and this atlas describes the script rather than the practice. Even so the two cannot be entirely separated in one respect: the reason a formal hand was wanted at all is that the material being written was held to matter, and a community that copies scripture with care tends also to draw it with care. The register also explains something about how the script is encountered today. Most people meet Ranjana as ornament rather than as text, so the letters are familiar as decoration long before they are recognised as writing, which is the opposite of how a working script is usually learnt.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Derived From
Ranjana Cha continues the sign Brahmi Cha writes in the same place of the inherited varnamala. The descent is not direct: it runs through the Gupta and Siddhamatrka stages of the northern Brahmi line and then the scripts of Nepal, and it is stated from position in the order rather than from shape.
Related To
Ranjana Cha and Devanagari Cha hold the same position in the inherited varnamala and write the same sound, as separate northern Brahmi descendants rather than as variants of one script. Devanagari is the relative most readers know, so the two charts can be read against each other.
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