La: The Ranjana Letter

La is the twenty eighth consonant of the Ranjana varnamala and the third of the four semivowels, the lateral made by letting air pass along the sides of the tongue while the tip touches the ridge behind the teeth. The Indian analysis pairs it with the vocalic l that stands among the vowels, in the same way it pairs ya with i, ra with vocalic r and va with u, and the pairing is stated as a rule about how sounds alternate rather than as a similarity noticed after the fact. Sanskrit uses the consonant widely, unlike its vocalic partner, which is one of the rarest letters in the whole chart.

In Ranjana it is written as any consonant sign, carrying the inherent short a, hanging from the head stroke and taking its vowel marks around it. It joins with a following consonant into a stacked form where no vowel intervenes, on the same terms as the letters of the grid. The letter is also one of the three whose reduced forms appear most often beneath other consonants in the northern scripts, so a reader working through a dense passage will meet its joined shape long before meeting an isolated instance of it. Learning the reduced form is therefore part of learning the letter rather than an advanced refinement, and the same is true of ra and va.