Alphabet Letters
Ranjana Ka
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
Ka is the first consonant of the Ranjana varnamala and the head of the first of the five vargas, the classes of five stops that form the core of the consonant table. It is a voiceless unaspirated velar, made by closing the back of the tongue against the soft palate, the furthest back of the five points of articulation, which is why its class stands first in a scheme that runs from the throat outwards to the lips. Like every consonant sign in the script it carries the inherent short a, so the letter is read ka and not k. No Unicode code point exists for any Ranjana letter, so the shape here is a vector outline lifted from an openly licensed Ranjana typeface; nothing in this entry is a Devanagari or Newa substitute.
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 voiceless unaspirated velar stop, the furthest back of the five points of articulation, heading the first varga. 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 PositionFirst of the thirty-three consonants, and first of the velar varga 2Tradition: The Ranjana varnamala Attributions
Associated SoundVoiceless unaspirated velar stop, read ka with the inherent vowel 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
Ka: The Ranjana Letter
The consonant half of the Ranjana varnamala is a grid rather than a list, and Ka is the cell in its top left corner. The grid has five rows, one for each point in the mouth at which a stop can be made, running from the back of the throat forward to the lips, and five columns describing what the voice and the breath are doing: voiceless without a following puff of breath, voiceless with one, voiced without one, voiced with one, and then the nasal made at that same point. Ka occupies the first row and the first column, the velar made with no voice and no aspiration, which is the simplest thing a speaker can do with a stop.
Everything else in the twenty five cells is described as a departure from it. That is why the classes are named after their first members, so the velars are the ka class, and why a learner who has understood the first row can predict the other four without being told. The four way distinction among stops is not common among the world's languages, and a script built for a language that has it needs four separate letters where many writing systems need one or two. The size of the Brahmic consonant chart follows from that requirement rather than from any love of completeness.
Ka and the Grid a Reader Can Predict
The great practical advantage of the Indian consonant order is that it is not arbitrary, so it does not have to be memorised cell by cell. Learn that the rows run velar, palatal, retroflex, dental, labial, and that within each row the order is plain voiceless, aspirated voiceless, plain voiced, aspirated voiced, nasal, and the whole of the chart follows.
Ka is the anchor for that scheme, and a reader who wants to find any of the other twenty four stops counts rows and columns from it. This holds across the entire Brahmic family, which is why someone who has learnt the order in one script can navigate a chart of another almost immediately, including a chart of Ranjana. It is also why the correspondence between Ranjana and Devanagari can be stated letter for letter with confidence: the two scripts write the same inherited series in the same inherited order, and only the drawing differs. For an unencoded script that consistency is more than a convenience. It is the main reason a Ranjana chart can be checked at all, since the position of a letter in the order is a fact independent of any typeface, any encoding and any individual scribe's hand, and it survives where more fragile evidence does not.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Derived From
Ranjana Ka continues the sign Brahmi Ka 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 Ka and Devanagari Ka 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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