A: The Ranjana Letter

The Indian analysis that Ranjana inherits does not order its letters by shape or by frequency but by the mouth itself. It begins with the vowels, because a vowel is the one sound that can be made with the vocal tract open and needs no consonant to release it, and it begins the vowels with a, the sound produced with the least effort of all: the tongue at rest, the lips neither spread nor rounded, the jaw barely open. Every other vowel in the series is then described against that neutral position, which is why the order of the varnamala is a description of anatomy rather than a convention that could have been otherwise. The consequence for writing is the feature that separates an abugida from an alphabet. Because a is the default, it is not drawn. A Ranjana consonant sign is already a syllable, and a scribe marks a vowel only when it is something other than a. The independent letter shown here therefore has a narrow job: it is needed where a word or a syllable opens with the vowel and there is no consonant for a mark to sit on.

In Sanskrit that happens often enough to make the sign familiar and seldom enough that a page of Ranjana is mostly consonant signs with marks arranged around them. A learner has to hold both facts at once, that the first letter of the series is the sound most often present in the language, and that it is the sound least often written.