Kha: The Ranjana Letter

Kha is the second cell of the velar row, the aspirated counterpart of Ka. Aspiration is the small puff of breath that follows the release of a stop, and in Sanskrit it distinguishes words rather than colouring them: ka and kha are two consonants, not one consonant said two ways. That is worth stating because English aspirates the k at the beginning of a word without noticing it and does not aspirate the one after an s, so an English speaker produces both sounds daily and hears them as the same letter. A script written for a language where the difference carries meaning cannot afford that. It needs a separate sign, and the varnamala gives one to each of the ten aspirated stops.

In Ranjana as in every script of the family, the aspirated letter is a distinct shape rather than the plain letter with a mark added, which is a design decision the family made early and kept. It has a cost in the number of letters to be learnt and a benefit in the clarity of a syllable at speed, since an aspirate is recognised as a whole shape rather than by inspecting a small addition to a neighbouring one. The aspirate is also where a reader can test whether they have understood the chart rather than merely memorised it. Asked to find the aspirated voiceless labial, someone who knows the scheme counts four rows down and one column across and arrives at the right cell without having seen it before. Kha is the first place that test can be applied, because it is the first departure from the plainest cell in the grid.