Cha: The Ranjana Letter

Cha is the second cell of the palatal row, the aspirated counterpart of Ca. As with the velars, the aspiration is a distinct consonant rather than a variant pronunciation, and the two letters are as separate in the chart and in the mind of a reader as any other pair. The palatals are affricates, so the aspirated member is heard as a ch with a following release of breath, and the difference between it and its plain partner is one that a speaker of a language without the contrast must be taught to hear. Every row of the grid carries the same pair in the same columns, so a learner meets the pattern five times and needs to learn only the shapes.

In Ranjana the shape is distinct rather than derived, following the family rule that an aspirate has its own letter rather than a diacritic. The script's heavy vertical stems and fine connecting strokes give each of these letters a strong outline, which is what a display hand needs, since a letter read from a lintel or a book cover has to be identified from its silhouette rather than from its detail. There is a further reason the family gave aspirates their own letters rather than a mark. A diacritic can be lost in a hurried copy or a worn page, and losing one here would turn one word into another; a whole shape is far harder to lose without the loss being obvious. Redundancy of that kind is a virtue in a manuscript tradition.