Jha: The Ranjana Letter

Jha is the fourth cell of the palatal row, the voiced aspirate, and it is the rarest of the palatal series in Sanskrit. Its rarity does not affect its place. The chart is built on the principle that each point of articulation carries the full set of four stop types and its own nasal, so a cell is filled because the scheme requires it, not because the language uses it often. That principle has already been seen among the vowels, where the vocalic liquids occupy cells that Sanskrit barely fills, and it recurs here. Ranjana inherits the letter and draws it in its own hand, and a chart of the script shows it in the position the order assigns.

In practice a scribe might go a long way through a text without needing it. The letter is nonetheless taught, recited in its place in the class, and reproduced in every typeface of the script, because the row is learnt whole and a row with a gap in it would no longer teach the pattern that makes the rest of the chart predictable. There is a second reason to keep such a letter. Sanskrit builds words by combining roots and endings under rules, and a sound that is rare in ordinary vocabulary may still be produced by a rule at a word junction. A chart that dropped it would leave a scribe with nothing to write when the rule fired.