Ranjana E

E is the eleventh letter of the Ranjana varnamala and the first of the four compound vowels, which the tradition treats as a class apart from the simple ones. The name compound records an analysis rather than a pronunciation: in the grammatical description these vowels arise from the combination of a with another vowel, so e is what results when a meets i, and the rule that produces it is one of the sound changes that operates whenever words are joined in Sanskrit. In speech it is a single long vowel made with the tongue in the front of the mouth, and it is always long, having no short partner in the classical language. That is why the vowel series does not pair it. Written after a consonant, e is marked above the letter rather than before, after or below it, using the space over the head stroke; the independent form shown here is used where the vowel begins a word. The compound vowels therefore introduce the fourth and last of the positions Ranjana uses for vowel marks, and with them a learner has met every place a mark can sit. The absence of a short e is itself a piece of information about the tradition.

Later languages of the region, including Nepal Bhasa, do distinguish short and long vowels of this quality, but the classical analysis that Ranjana carries recognised only the long one, so the chart has a single letter where a chart drawn for a modern language would need two. That gap is one of the places where the inherited system and the spoken language of the Kathmandu Valley pull against each other, and it is a normal condition for a script used to write more than one language rather than a defect in either.

The head stroke is the most immediately visible thing about Ranjana, a heavy horizontal bar from which the letters hang and along which the eye travels, and the compound vowels are the marks that use the space above it. That gives the script a second register. Below the bar are the consonants and the marks for u and the vocalic liquids, and above it are the marks for e, ai, o and au together with the sign for a nasal. A line of Ranjana therefore has activity on both sides of a strong horizontal, which is a large part of why the script reads as ornamental rather than merely legible, and why it was chosen for display work. The thick and thin contrast of the strokes reinforces it: the bar and the descending stems are heavy, the connecting strokes and many of the marks are fine, and the wedge shaped terminals catch the light of a page in the way a formal hand is meant to. This is the quality that carried the script beyond Nepal.

Tibetan tradition took it up under the name Lantsa for headings, book covers and the inscriptions on painted works, where a script that fills a panel with a strong horizontal and a set of marks above and below it does exactly what a decorative border needs. The mark for e is a good illustration of the economy involved. It is a small stroke, it costs the scribe almost nothing, and it uses space that would otherwise be empty, so the syllable grows in information without growing in width. A script whose vowels were written in line, as a Latin alphabet writes them, would need more of the page for the same text and would lose the even vertical rhythm that makes a Ranjana line look ruled.