Bha and the Column of Voiced Aspirates

Reading a varnamala down its columns rather than across its rows is a useful exercise, and the fourth column is the most instructive. It contains five letters, one at each point of articulation, for a class of sound that most of the world's languages do not have at all: the voiced aspirate, produced with voicing through the closure and a breathy release. Their presence in the chart is a statement about the language the chart was built for, and their retention in every descendant script is a statement about how these systems are transmitted. A script family that inherits a chart rather than assembling one keeps the whole of it.

Ranjana, at the far northern edge of that family and used chiefly for Sanskrit in a valley whose own language is Tibeto-Burman, carries all five voiced aspirates because the chart carries them. The same logic explains the retroflex row, the vocalic liquids among the vowels and the rare letters nobody writes. What is inherited is not a set of useful signs but a description of a language, and a description is kept complete or it stops being one. Reading down the other columns is worth the same effort. The nasal column shows five sounds distinguished only by where they are made; the plain voiceless column shows the five stations of the mouth stripped of every other feature. Each column is a demonstration of one variable held constant.