Ranjana Sha

Sha is the thirtieth consonant of the Ranjana varnamala and the first of the three sibilants, made at the hard palate, and it is close to the sh of English ship. The three sibilants are grouped after the semivowels because they share a manner rather than a place: each is made by forcing air through a narrow channel to produce continuous friction, and they differ from one another by where that channel is. Sha is palatal, the second is retroflex and the third is dental, so the three between them repeat three of the five stations the grid used, which is why the order runs as it does. Sanskrit uses this letter heavily and it appears in a great deal of religious vocabulary.

In Ranjana it is written as any consonant sign, carrying the inherent short a, hanging from the head bar, taking vowel marks in the four positions and entering joined forms with a following consonant where no vowel comes between them. The letter's frequency in religious vocabulary also makes it common in the material Ranjana chiefly carried, so it is among the shapes an outside reader is most likely to have seen on a cover, a lintel or a carved panel without being able to name it. In an ornamental hand a letter met that often becomes recognisable as a silhouette long before it is understood as a sound.

The sibilants are the clearest illustration of what the chart does when a group of sounds shares a manner but not a place. Rather than making a sixth row of the grid, which would have implied stops that do not exist, the tradition lists the three in order of the same forward movement through the mouth that governs the grid itself: palatal, retroflex, dental. The arrangement is consistent without being forced, and the choice tells a reader that the grid was built as a description rather than as a template to be filled. There is a further point specific to these three letters. They are among the sounds that later Indo-Aryan languages merged, so a modern speaker of several of the region's languages pronounces two or three of them identically while writing them differently, and the spelling preserves a distinction the mouth has lost.

Ranjana carries all three because it carries the Sanskrit chart, and the Sanskrit distinction was real, which is why the letters are worth recording separately even in a script whose users may not have distinguished them in speech. Recording them separately is also what keeps the atlas useful to a reader working back from a manuscript. A chart that merged the sibilants to match modern speech would leave that reader with no way to name what is actually on the page.