Ddha and the Names of the Letters

There is a habit of reading letter names as words, and it comes from the Semitic scripts, where the name of a letter is often an ordinary noun and the letter's ancestor was a picture of that thing. Aleph names an ox; beth names a house. Brahmic letter names do not work that way, and expecting them to leads a reader astray. The name of this letter is the sound it writes with the inherent vowel attached, spoken as a syllable, and that is all it is. The same holds throughout the chart: a Ranjana letter is named by saying it. This is worth stating plainly because the difference is a difference of kind and not of degree.

In a Semitic script the name preserves a memory of a picture and invites reconstruction of what the picture was. In a Brahmic script the name is a phonetic label attached to a cell of a grid, and there is no picture behind it to recover. What a Ranjana letter name tells you is its sound and its position in the order, which is genuinely useful information and not a lesser kind of meaning. The difference has a practical edge for this atlas. Where a Semitic letter carries a gloss that is a modern reconstruction and is marked as such, a Brahmic letter carries a plain statement of its sound and its place in the order, and adding a reconstruction caveat to it would assert a doubt that nobody holds.