Ra and the Letter That Changes Shape

The special treatment of r is the clearest case in any Brahmic script where a letter's written form depends on its surroundings, and it is worth understanding because it defeats the simple picture of one sound to one sign. A cluster beginning with r may be shown by a mark set above the head stroke at the end of the cluster rather than in the position where the sound is spoken; a cluster where r comes second may be shown by a stroke attached below the first consonant. Neither device is the letter, and both are read as it.

For Ranjana this has a practical consequence in the digital present. A typeface for an unencoded script has to reproduce not only the letters but the behaviour, and behaviour of this kind is where the work of digitising a script actually lies. It is also why the outlines recorded in this atlas are the letters of the chart rather than a claim to represent every form the script can produce: a chart shows the inventory, and the inventory is only the first part of what a scribe knows. There is a related caution for anyone comparing scripts. Two relatives that agree perfectly on the letters of the chart may differ considerably in how they write clusters involving r, so a correspondence stated between two letters is not a claim that the two scripts write every word the same way.