Kha and the Cost of a Distinction

Every distinction a writing system makes has to be paid for, in letters to be learnt, in sorts to be cut and in shapes to be told apart at small sizes, and the aspirates are the largest single bill the Brahmic scripts pay. Ten of the thirty three consonants exist only to mark aspiration. A script that dropped them would lose a third of its inventory and would misspell a great deal of Sanskrit, so no script of the family has ever tried.

What varies between the relatives is how the shapes are managed, and Ranjana manages them as a formal hand: heavy vertical stems, fine connecting strokes, a strong head bar and the wedge shaped terminals that make its letters read as carved even when they are written. The result is a script that distinguishes its aspirates clearly at display size, which is the size at which Ranjana was chiefly used. It was the prestige hand of the Kathmandu Valley for titles, headings, mantras and the display writing on manuscript covers, while the running text of a Newar manuscript was more often set down in one of the Valley's plainer hands. A script kept for the places where a page is looked at as well as read can afford weight that a working hand cannot. The distinction is also what makes the script hard to abbreviate. A hand that simplifies its aspirates towards their plain partners saves effort and destroys meaning, so the ornamental care Ranjana takes over each shape is not only a matter of taste.