Na and the Syllable as the Unit of Writing

The deepest difference between a Brahmic script and an alphabet is not the marks or the conjuncts but what the writing is a record of. An alphabet records a sequence of segments and leaves the syllable to be inferred. An abugida records syllables, and the marks and joins are the machinery by which a syllable is assembled on the page. This is why a Ranjana line reads as a row of clusters rather than a row of letters, why a vowel mark can appear to the left of the consonant it follows, and why two consonants without a vowel between them have to be drawn as one joined form: each of those features exists to keep the written unit and the spoken unit aligned. It also explains why the order of the chart is phonetic.

A system that writes syllables benefits from a classification of the sounds that make them, and the varnamala supplies one. Ranjana inherits the whole of that arrangement, including the machinery, and its contribution is a way of drawing it that is heavier, more contrasted and more suited to display than most of its relatives. That alignment is also why these scripts handle a change of language relatively well. A syllable is a syllable in any language, so a Brahmic script fitted to Sanskrit can be turned to a quite different language with adjustments at the edges rather than a redesign, which is what happened when Ranjana was used for Nepal Bhasa.