Sa and the Chart Read as a Whole

Standing one letter from the end of the varnamala is a good place to look back at what the chart has set out. Fourteen independent vowels, arranged by position and by length and including two liquids that Sanskrit barely uses. Twenty five stops in five classes of five, each class made at one point in the mouth and closed by its own nasal, the classes running from the throat forward to the lips. Four semivowels, each paired with a vowel of the same position. Three sibilants, at three of the same five stations. And one letter still to come. Forty seven signs in total, every one of them placed by a phonetic argument rather than by convention, and the whole order taught aloud before any of it is drawn.

Ranjana inherited that structure entire from the northern Brahmic tradition and altered no part of it. What the Kathmandu Valley contributed was a hand, and the hand is what makes the script worth looking at as well as reading: heavy stems, fine joins, a strong head bar and wedge terminals, developed for writing that was meant to be seen. That division of labour is worth stating plainly at the end of the order, because it is the thing most often got wrong about the script. The analysis is South Asian and shared; the drawing is Newar and particular, and it is the drawing that a reader is looking at.