Alphabet Letters
Ranjana Ssa
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
Ssa is the thirty-first consonant of the Ranjana varnamala, the retroflex sibilant, made with the tongue tip curled back. In most modern pronunciation of Sanskrit it is not distinguished from the palatal sibilant, but the writing systems keep them apart because the grammar does, and a manuscript that confuses them tells an editor something about the hand that produced it. Its conjunct with ka gives ksha, the letter often appended to alphabet charts as a thirty-fourth consonant. 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 retroflex sibilant, made with the tongue tip curled back; not distinguished from the palatal sibilant in most modern pronunciation of Sanskrit but kept apart in writing. 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 PositionThirty-first of the thirty-three consonants 2Tradition: The Ranjana varnamala Attributions
Associated SoundRetroflex sibilant; usually not distinguished from the palatal sibilant in modern pronunciation 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
Ssa: The Ranjana Letter
Ssa is the thirty first consonant of the Ranjana varnamala and the second of the three sibilants, the retroflex, made with the tip of the tongue curled back towards the roof of the mouth while air is forced through the narrow channel that remains. It stands to the palatal sibilant as the retroflex stops stand to the palatals, and the parallel is deliberate: the same five stations of the mouth that organise the grid are used again here, with only three of them occupied because Sanskrit has only three sibilants. The letter is common in Sanskrit and is produced frequently by the rules that govern the joining of words, so a scribe meets it constantly.
In Ranjana it is written as any consonant, with the inherent short a and the head stroke, and it takes its vowel marks and enters joined forms on the same terms as the rest of the chart. Its position also completes a small symmetry. The grid used five stations of the mouth and filled all five; the semivowels used four positions and filled four; the sibilants use three and fill three. Each group is complete with respect to the sounds Sanskrit actually has at those points, which is why the chart looks systematic without any group being padded to match another.
Ssa and the Sounds That Rules Produce
A great deal of what a scribe of Sanskrit writes is not chosen but produced, by the rules that govern what happens when two words or two elements of a word meet. The retroflex sibilant is one of the letters those rules generate most often, appearing where a dental sibilant would otherwise stand, under conditions the grammatical tradition states precisely. This changes what learning to write the language involves. A scribe is not memorising the spelling of individual words so much as applying a system, and a text is correct when the system has been applied correctly rather than when each word matches a remembered form. It also explains why the phonetic order of the chart is practical rather than theoretical: a rule stated in terms of place and manner is only usable if the letters are arranged by place and manner, so the chart and the grammar were built to work together.
Ranjana inherits both, and a Newar scribe copying Sanskrit scripture in the Kathmandu Valley was working inside that system exactly as a scribe anywhere else in the Sanskrit world was. The same point explains why these scripts are learnt with a grammar rather than as a set of shapes. A reader who knows only the letters can copy; a reader who knows the rules can tell a correct text from a corrupt one, which is what a manuscript tradition needs.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Derived From
Ranjana Ssa continues the sign Brahmi Ssa 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 Ssa and Devanagari Ssa 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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