Da: The Ranjana Letter

Da is the third cell of the dental row, the plain voiced dental, and it stands to Ta as Ga stands to Ka. By the fourth row of the grid the scheme is entirely predictable, and the value of that predictability is worth stating: a reader who has forgotten the shape of a letter can still say what sound belongs in its cell, and a scribe who has miscounted can find the error by reciting the row. Sanskrit uses this consonant heavily, and it stands in a pair with the retroflex of the row above that separates different words, so the distinction has to be kept.

In Ranjana the letter is written as any consonant sign, with the inherent short a already present, hanging from the head stroke and taking its vowel marks in the four positions the script uses. Like every consonant in the chart it can be joined with a following consonant into a single stacked form, which in a dense passage of Sanskrit happens often enough that the joined shapes are as much a part of reading the script as the plain letters. The predictability also has a bearing on how such a script can be recovered. Where a manuscript is damaged, a reader who knows the order can often say what letter must have stood in a gap, because the grid constrains the possibilities in a way an alphabet does not.