E: The Ranjana Letter

E is the eleventh letter of the Ranjana varnamala and the first of the four compound vowels, which the tradition treats as a class apart from the simple ones. The name compound records an analysis rather than a pronunciation: in the grammatical description these vowels arise from the combination of a with another vowel, so e is what results when a meets i, and the rule that produces it is one of the sound changes that operates whenever words are joined in Sanskrit. In speech it is a single long vowel made with the tongue in the front of the mouth, and it is always long, having no short partner in the classical language. That is why the vowel series does not pair it. Written after a consonant, e is marked above the letter rather than before, after or below it, using the space over the head stroke; the independent form shown here is used where the vowel begins a word. The compound vowels therefore introduce the fourth and last of the positions Ranjana uses for vowel marks, and with them a learner has met every place a mark can sit. The absence of a short e is itself a piece of information about the tradition.

Later languages of the region, including Nepal Bhasa, do distinguish short and long vowels of this quality, but the classical analysis that Ranjana carries recognised only the long one, so the chart has a single letter where a chart drawn for a modern language would need two. That gap is one of the places where the inherited system and the spoken language of the Kathmandu Valley pull against each other, and it is a normal condition for a script used to write more than one language rather than a defect in either.