Ranjana Vocalic L

Vocalic l is the ninth letter of the Ranjana varnamala and the rarest of the Sanskrit vowels. It is a syllabic l, an l that carries a syllable with no other vowel in it, standing to ordinary l as vocalic r stands to r. In classical Sanskrit it occurs in the forms of a single verbal root and in the grammarians' discussion of that root, and outside that it is essentially absent from running text. Its place on the chart is nonetheless secure, for the same reason vocalic rr holds its place: the analysis requires that the liquids classed as vowels appear in the series, and the series is taught complete. Written as an independent letter, shown here, it appears at the head of a word; as a mark it would sit beneath its consonant like the other vowels of its group.

What makes the letter interesting is not its use but its status. It is a piece of a grammatical description made visible, a sign that the varnamala is not a list of the sounds a scribe needed but a diagram of how one tradition analysed the sounds a language could contain, drawn out in full whether or not each cell of the diagram is occupied. There is a second reason to keep it, which is that the tradition's own commentaries discuss it. A letter that grammarians argued about has a history in the literature even when it has almost none in ordinary text, and dropping it from a chart would make that literature harder to follow. Ranjana, whose principal work was copying Sanskrit and whose users learnt the order by recitation, had every reason to keep the full series intact.

A varnamala chart is usually presented as a teaching aid, but it is better understood as an argument set out in rows and columns. The vowels come first because they need nothing else to be spoken. They are ordered from the position of least effort outwards. Length is treated as a dimension, so each vowel appears twice. The liquids that can carry a syllable are admitted as vowels and given the same treatment. Then the consonants follow in five classes of five, ordered from the back of the mouth to the lips, each class closed by its own nasal, with the semivowels, sibilants and the aspirate after them.

Every position in that grid asserts something about how a sound is made and how it relates to its neighbours. Vocalic l is one of the cells that the language barely fills, and it is retained because removing it would break the argument rather than because anyone needs to write it. Ranjana inherits the grid intact, along with the recitation that teaches it, and draws each cell in its own ornamental hand. Where the script differs from its relatives is in the drawing, not in the analysis, which is why a Ranjana chart and a Devanagari chart can be read against each other line for line even by someone who can read only one of them.