Ranjana Vocalic Ll

Vocalic ll is the tenth letter of the Ranjana varnamala and the least attested of them all. It is the long counterpart of vocalic l, a syllabic l held for the duration of a long vowel, and it is not securely attested in any Sanskrit word at all. It appears in the grammatical tradition as the completion of a pattern, since a vowel classed as short implies a long partner, and it appears on the alphabet chart for the same reason.

Every Brahmic script that teaches the full varnamala draws it, and Ranjana is no exception. As with the other vowels there is an independent form, shown here, for the head of a word, and in principle an attached mark for the position after a consonant, although the occasion for writing that mark does not arise in ordinary text. It is the clearest single instance of a letter that exists to satisfy a system. Recording it in an atlas rather than passing over it is deliberate: a reader who counts the vowels of a Brahmic script and finds fourteen where they expected six is being told something true about how the tradition thought, and that is worth more than a tidier chart would be. The letter also marks a boundary in the series. After it the chart turns to the compound vowels, which are of a different kind again, so vocalic ll is the last of the simple and liquid vowels and the point at which one principle of ordering gives way to another. Its position is therefore load bearing even though its use is not.

Asking how many letters Ranjana has turns out to be a question with more than one answer, and this letter is at the edge of it. Counting the independent vowels of the classical series gives fourteen, and counting the consonants gives thirty three, which is the forty seven letters recorded here. Charts that include the anusvara and visarga, the marks for a nasal and a final breath, count higher; charts that drop the two vocalic l letters as unusable count lower; and charts made for writing Nepal Bhasa rather than Sanskrit raise a further question, because the Newar language has six aspirated sonorants that Sanskrit lacks and it is not settled whether Ranjana counts those as letters or writes them as combinations with ha.

The atlas records that last point as an open question rather than deciding it, since resolving it would need the alphabet primers used to teach the script in the Kathmandu Valley, or the encoding proposals put to the Unicode committee. What can be said without hesitation is the part every source shares, the fourteen vowels and thirty three consonants of the inherited series, and vocalic ll is a member of that agreed set even though nobody writes it. Counting is not a pedantic exercise here. For a script with no character standard, the count is the inventory, and the inventory is what a typeface designer implements, what a teacher puts on a chart and what an encoding proposal has to argue for. Getting it wrong in either direction has consequences for a small community's ability to write its own language.