Dha: The Ranjana Letter

Dha is the fourth cell of the dental row, the voiced aspirate dental, made with the tongue at the teeth, the vocal folds vibrating through the closure and a breathy release following it. It is common in Sanskrit, appearing in a number of the most frequent roots and in a good deal of religious vocabulary, so unlike some of the voiced aspirates of other rows it is a letter a scribe draws often. The romanisation dh is a source of the same confusion the aspirated voiceless dental attracts, since English has no comparable sound and reads the h as though it made a fricative.

In the chart the cell is unambiguous. Ranjana writes the letter as it writes every consonant, carrying the inherent short a, hanging from the head stroke, taking vowel marks in the four positions and entering joined forms with a following consonant. Its place is fixed by the same two dimensions that fix the rest of the grid, and it can be found by counting from any other cell. The letter also appears in a good many words that a Newar scribe copying Buddhist scripture would have written daily, so it is one of the shapes where a hand's individual habits show most clearly, and one of the letters by which a manuscript's script can be dated and placed.