Ranjana Jha

Jha is the fourth cell of the palatal row, the voiced aspirate, and it is the rarest of the palatal series in Sanskrit. Its rarity does not affect its place. The chart is built on the principle that each point of articulation carries the full set of four stop types and its own nasal, so a cell is filled because the scheme requires it, not because the language uses it often. That principle has already been seen among the vowels, where the vocalic liquids occupy cells that Sanskrit barely fills, and it recurs here. Ranjana inherits the letter and draws it in its own hand, and a chart of the script shows it in the position the order assigns.

In practice a scribe might go a long way through a text without needing it. The letter is nonetheless taught, recited in its place in the class, and reproduced in every typeface of the script, because the row is learnt whole and a row with a gap in it would no longer teach the pattern that makes the rest of the chart predictable. There is a second reason to keep such a letter. Sanskrit builds words by combining roots and endings under rules, and a sound that is rare in ordinary vocabulary may still be produced by a rule at a word junction. A chart that dropped it would leave a scribe with nothing to write when the rule fired.

For a script with no character encoding, the alphabet chart and the typeface are the two places the inventory lives, and they have to agree. A rare letter like Jha is a good test of both. A font that omitted it would be usable for most text and would fail without warning on the words that need it, and there would be no character standard to appeal to, because Ranjana has none: a provisional slot exists on the Unicode roadmap and proposals have been submitted, but nothing is encoded. The glyphs recorded in this atlas are vector outlines taken from an openly licensed Ranjana typeface, and the licence was checked from the font's own licence file rather than assumed, because an open licence carries obligations that travel with the work.

Two alternatives were rejected. Borrowing a Devanagari or Newa character would assert an identity between different scripts. Drawing the letters by hand would mean inventing shapes for a script that a living community still uses, which is not something an outside project should do. Recording an outline and saying plainly where it came from is the honest option, and it leaves the letters checkable by anyone who wants to compare them with the real hand. The same reasoning governs what this atlas declines to record. Where the sources do not agree on whether a shape is a letter of the script at all, the honest entry is an open question rather than a forty eighth letter, and that is how the six aspirated sonorants of Nepal Bhasa are handled here.