Pa and the Movement of the Chart Through the Mouth

The five rows of the consonant grid are a map of the mouth read from back to front, and the labial row is the end of the journey. Velar at the soft palate, palatal at the hard palate, retroflex with the tongue curled back behind the ridge, dental at the teeth, labial at the lips: a reciter of the chart moves the point of closure steadily forward through five stations and closes each one with its own nasal. Described that way the order stops looking like a convention and starts looking like what it is, a physical description turned into a sequence. It is one of the reasons the arrangement has been stable for more than two thousand years across dozens of scripts and many languages, since a convention can drift and a description cannot without becoming wrong.

Ranjana, developed in the Kathmandu Valley from about the eleventh century, inherits the sequence entire. Nothing in the order is a Newar innovation, and nothing needed to be. What the Valley added was a hand: heavy stems, fine joins, a strong head bar and wedge terminals, applied to a chart that arrived already complete. The map is also why the order can be recited by someone who has never seen the chart written down. A reciter is describing a movement rather than recalling a list, and a movement is far harder to forget the middle of.