Ha and the Question the Atlas Leaves Open

Ha is the letter that the unresolved question about Ranjana's inventory turns on. Nepal Bhasa, the Newar language for which the script was used alongside Sanskrit, has six aspirated sonorants that Sanskrit does not, and the question is whether the Ranjana tradition counts them as letters of its own varnamala or writes them as combinations of a base letter with this one.

The atlas does not answer it. There is no character standard to appeal to, because Ranjana is unencoded; the openly licensed typeface used for the outlines here ships one build that can reach these six shapes and one that cannot, depending on which script's code points it is mapped onto; and neither the font nor the sources consulted state what the tradition itself holds. Six identifiers have been reserved in case the answer is that they are letters, and the question is recorded with what would settle it: a reading of the alphabet charts and primers used to teach Ranjana in the Kathmandu Valley, or of the encoding proposals put to the Unicode committee. Leaving it open is the point. Deciding it by assumption would put a wrong count of a living community's letters into a reference work, which is a worse outcome than an admitted gap.