Au and the Turn From Vowels to Consonants

The point where a varnamala stops listing vowels and begins listing consonants is where the chart changes its organising principle, and it is worth pausing on. The vowels were ordered by position and by length, in pairs, along a single line of description. The consonants that follow are ordered in a grid: five classes of five, each class made at one point in the mouth, each running through the same four kinds of stop before closing on its own nasal, and the classes themselves running from the back of the mouth forward to the lips. After the grid come the four semivowels, the three sibilants and the aspirate, which do not fit the pattern of stops and are listed after it.

A reader who understands that turn can predict the whole second half of the chart from its first row, which is the practical genius of the arrangement and the reason the order has survived unchanged across a script family that spans two thousand years and several dozen writing systems. Ranjana inherits the grid whole, and gives it an ornamental hand of the Kathmandu Valley rather than altering a single position in it. The turn also changes what the letters do on the page. A vowel of the series is written in full only when nothing precedes it, so the fourteen independent vowels are the smaller half of the chart in use as well as in count; the thirty three consonants carry almost every syllable, with the vowels reduced to marks around them. Anyone reading a page of Ranjana is therefore reading the second half of the chart nearly all of the time, and meeting the first half mainly at the openings of words.