Ddha: The Ranjana Letter

Ddha is the fourth cell of the retroflex row, the voiced aspirate retroflex, and it combines the two features that make the Indo-Aryan stop system unusual. It is retroflex, made with the tongue tip curled back, and it is a voiced aspirate, produced with the vocal folds vibrating through the closure and a breathy release after it. Neither feature is common among the world's languages and the combination is rarer still, so this cell of the chart is one of the places where the Brahmic scripts record something that most writing systems have never needed to record. Its frequency in Sanskrit is low, which does not affect its place: the grid is filled by principle.

Ranjana inherits the letter, draws it in the ornamental hand of the Kathmandu Valley, and treats it exactly as it treats its neighbours, with the inherent short a, the head stroke, the four positions for vowel marks and the ability to enter a joined form with a following consonant. The rarity of the sound is also why its letter is a good test of whether a chart is complete. A chart drawn from what a scribe actually needed would be likely to drop it; a chart drawn from the tradition's analysis keeps it, and every Brahmic chart keeps it, which tells you which kind of document these charts are.