Alphabet Letters
Ranjana Ra
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
Ra is the twenty-seventh consonant of the Ranjana varnamala and the second of the semivowels, the consonantal counterpart of vocalic r. In conjuncts it behaves unlike any other letter: preceding another consonant it is written as a mark above the syllable, and following one it is written as a stroke below, so a single letter takes two quite different subsidiary shapes. Ranjana's forms of both are distinctive, and they are among the features by which the script is identified at a glance. 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 second semivowel, the consonantal counterpart of vocalic r. 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 PositionTwenty-seventh of the thirty-three consonants 2Tradition: The Ranjana varnamala Attributions
Associated SoundThe r semivowel, the consonantal counterpart of vocalic r; written as a mark above or a stroke below in conjuncts 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
Ra: The Ranjana Letter
Ra is the twenty seventh consonant of the Ranjana varnamala and the second of the four semivowels, paired in the grammatical analysis with the vocalic r that stands among the vowels. It is the sound that behaves least predictably of the four across the Brahmic family, because a following or preceding r is very often written by a special mark or a reduced form rather than by the full letter, and the devices used differ from script to script. That variability is the exception to the family's usual consistency, and it exists because r combines with other consonants more freely than any other sound in Sanskrit, so the scripts developed shorthand for it. In Ranjana the full letter is written like any consonant, with the inherent short a and hanging from the head stroke, and it takes its vowel marks in the four available positions.
Where it enters a cluster the treatment follows the northern pattern of reduced and attached forms rather than the plain letter, which is one of the things a learner has to be shown rather than deduce. The letter also matters to the appearance of a page. Because r combines so freely, its reduced forms are among the commonest marks a reader sees, and a hand's treatment of them is one of the features by which one scribe's writing can be told from another's. In an ornamental script the same marks are among the places where the contrast between heavy and fine strokes is most visible.
Ra and the Letter That Changes Shape
The special treatment of r is the clearest case in any Brahmic script where a letter's written form depends on its surroundings, and it is worth understanding because it defeats the simple picture of one sound to one sign. A cluster beginning with r may be shown by a mark set above the head stroke at the end of the cluster rather than in the position where the sound is spoken; a cluster where r comes second may be shown by a stroke attached below the first consonant. Neither device is the letter, and both are read as it.
For Ranjana this has a practical consequence in the digital present. A typeface for an unencoded script has to reproduce not only the letters but the behaviour, and behaviour of this kind is where the work of digitising a script actually lies. It is also why the outlines recorded in this atlas are the letters of the chart rather than a claim to represent every form the script can produce: a chart shows the inventory, and the inventory is only the first part of what a scribe knows. There is a related caution for anyone comparing scripts. Two relatives that agree perfectly on the letters of the chart may differ considerably in how they write clusters involving r, so a correspondence stated between two letters is not a claim that the two scripts write every word the same way.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Derived From
Ranjana Ra continues the sign Brahmi Ra 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 Ra and Devanagari Ra 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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