Pha: The Ranjana Letter

Pha is the second cell of the labial row, the aspirated voiceless labial, a p released with a following puff of breath. As with the aspirated dental, the romanisation misleads, because ph in English spells a fricative and the Sanskrit letter is a stop with aspiration. In the chart the cell is unambiguous, defined by its row and column. The letter completes the pattern for the last of the five classes, and by this point in the recitation the pattern is doing all the work: a learner reaching the labial row knows what each of its five cells will contain before hearing them.

Ranjana draws the letter in the position assigned and writes it as it writes every consonant, with the inherent short a and the head bar. That regularity is what makes a chart of an unfamiliar Brahmic script readable in a few minutes by anyone who knows the order, and it is the reason the correspondence between Ranjana and its better known relatives can be set out letter by letter rather than approximated. The letter is also where a modern reader of Nepali or Hindi meets a divergence, because in several modern languages the sound this cell writes has shifted towards a fricative, so a letter that names an aspirated stop is now often read as an f. The chart records the classical value, and the modern reading is a change on top of it.