Nya and Learning an Order by Voice

The varnamala is taught aloud before it is taught by hand, and that fact shapes everything about how these scripts have survived. A learner recites the vowels as a block, then each consonant class as a block, and acquires the sequence as a rhythm rather than as a table. The shapes are attached to positions already known. One consequence is that the order is extremely stable across the family, since it is carried by the voice and not only by the page, and a change in the sequence would be audible immediately to anyone who had learnt it. Another is that the order survives even where the script does not.

For Ranjana this has been the difference between a script at risk and a script recoverable. The Newar community's use of Ranjana narrowed over the twentieth century, and in recent decades it has been deliberately taught and revived, appearing again on signs and shopfronts in the Kathmandu Valley and in the work of Newar language activists. A revival of that kind needs the shapes, which survive in manuscripts and in the memory of practitioners, but it also needs the order, which survives because it is recited. The recitation has one further advantage that is easy to miss. It is transmissible without materials. A teacher and a learner need nothing but voices, so an order learnt this way survives the loss of every chart, every font and every manuscript, which is not a hypothetical consideration for a script in Ranjana's position.