Sa: The Ranjana Letter

Sa is the thirty second consonant of the Ranjana varnamala and the third and last of the sibilants, the dental, made with the tongue against the back of the upper teeth and air forced through the narrow channel. It is the plainest of the three to a reader of a Latin alphabet, being close to the s of English, and it is the commonest of them in Sanskrit. With it the sibilants are complete and only one letter of the chart remains. In Ranjana it is written as any consonant sign, carrying the inherent short a, hanging from the head stroke and taking its vowel marks in the four positions the script uses, and it joins with a following consonant into a stacked form where no vowel intervenes.

Sa is also among the letters most often seen in clusters, since Sanskrit combines it freely with stops and semivowels, so a reader who wants to learn the joined forms of the script will meet its reduced shapes early. Its dental articulation also places it exactly where the fourth row of the grid sits, which is the point of listing the sibilants in the order palatal, retroflex, dental: the same forward movement through the mouth that organised the stops is being used a third time, on a smaller set. Nothing in the chart's arrangement is idle.