Gha: The Ranjana Letter

Gha is the fourth cell of the velar row, the voiced aspirate, and it is the cell that most often surprises a reader coming from outside the Indian tradition. A voiced aspirate is made with the vocal folds vibrating through the closure and a breathy release following it, and it is a genuinely uncommon sound among the world's languages. Sanskrit has one at each of the five points of articulation, giving five such letters, and their presence is one of the features that marks the Indo-Aryan languages out. Because the sound is rare, its description has a long history in the Indian phonetic tradition, which analysed it precisely long before comparable work was done elsewhere. Ranjana inherits the letter with the rest of the row.

Written, it behaves as any consonant does, carrying the inherent short a and hanging from the head bar, and it takes vowel marks and enters conjuncts on the same terms as its neighbours. Its interest lies in what it records rather than in how it is drawn: a writing system with a dedicated sign for a voiced aspirate is a writing system made for a language that had them and for a tradition that had described them. The letter is also a reminder that the chart records a language rather than a region. Nepal Bhasa, the Newar language of the Valley where Ranjana was made, does not have the Sanskrit series of voiced aspirates in the same shape, and the letter is in the script because the whole varnamala came in as a unit with its analysis attached.