Alphabet Letters
Ranjana Gha
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
Gha is the fourth consonant of the Ranjana varnamala and the voiced aspirate of the velar class, a sound in which voicing and a breathy release occur together. The voiced aspirates are among the more distinctive features of the Indo-Aryan consonant inventory and are the letters that Tibetan, adapting the same Indian model, chose not to take into its own alphabet of thirty. Ranjana, writing Sanskrit directly rather than adapting the system to another language, keeps all four members of every class. Because Ranjana is not encoded in Unicode there is no code point to record for it, and the letter is shown here as a vector outline drawn from an openly licensed Ranjana typeface rather than as text.
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 voiced aspirate of the velar class, combining voicing with a breathy release. 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 PositionFourth of the thirty-three consonants, the voiced aspirate of the velar varga 2Tradition: The Ranjana varnamala Attributions
Associated SoundVoiced aspirated velar stop, with voicing and breathy release together 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
Gha: The Ranjana Letter
Gha is the fourth cell of the velar row, the voiced aspirate, and it is the cell that most often surprises a reader coming from outside the Indian tradition. A voiced aspirate is made with the vocal folds vibrating through the closure and a breathy release following it, and it is a genuinely uncommon sound among the world's languages. Sanskrit has one at each of the five points of articulation, giving five such letters, and their presence is one of the features that marks the Indo-Aryan languages out. Because the sound is rare, its description has a long history in the Indian phonetic tradition, which analysed it precisely long before comparable work was done elsewhere. Ranjana inherits the letter with the rest of the row.
Written, it behaves as any consonant does, carrying the inherent short a and hanging from the head bar, and it takes vowel marks and enters conjuncts on the same terms as its neighbours. Its interest lies in what it records rather than in how it is drawn: a writing system with a dedicated sign for a voiced aspirate is a writing system made for a language that had them and for a tradition that had described them. The letter is also a reminder that the chart records a language rather than a region. Nepal Bhasa, the Newar language of the Valley where Ranjana was made, does not have the Sanskrit series of voiced aspirates in the same shape, and the letter is in the script because the whole varnamala came in as a unit with its analysis attached.
Gha and the Phonetics Written Into a Chart
The Indian grammatical tradition did not merely list the sounds of its language; it described how each was made, in terms of the place of contact, the manner of closure, the state of the glottis and the presence or absence of breath, and it arranged the letters so that the arrangement itself carried the description. The chart is the theory. That is why the voiced aspirates occupy a single column across all five rows rather than being scattered, and why the nasals close each row rather than being grouped together at the end. A reader of the chart is reading an analysis, and a scribe drawing it is copying one. This matters for how Ranjana should be understood. It is an ornamental hand, developed in the Kathmandu Valley from about the eleventh century and used with great care for the appearance of a page, but it is not a decorative script in the sense of being free with its content. The inventory, the order and the classification were fixed long before Ranjana existed and were not the Valley's to change.
What the Newar scribes contributed was a way of drawing that inheritance, and the drawing is where their invention went. It also explains why an atlas can state the correspondences between these scripts letter by letter with confidence. The cell is the fact, and the cell is the same in every descendant. Only the drawing has to be checked against a particular hand.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Derived From
Ranjana Gha continues the sign Brahmi Gha 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 Gha and Devanagari Gha 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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