Ssa: The Ranjana Letter

Ssa is the thirty first consonant of the Ranjana varnamala and the second of the three sibilants, the retroflex, made with the tip of the tongue curled back towards the roof of the mouth while air is forced through the narrow channel that remains. It stands to the palatal sibilant as the retroflex stops stand to the palatals, and the parallel is deliberate: the same five stations of the mouth that organise the grid are used again here, with only three of them occupied because Sanskrit has only three sibilants. The letter is common in Sanskrit and is produced frequently by the rules that govern the joining of words, so a scribe meets it constantly.

In Ranjana it is written as any consonant, with the inherent short a and the head stroke, and it takes its vowel marks and enters joined forms on the same terms as the rest of the chart. Its position also completes a small symmetry. The grid used five stations of the mouth and filled all five; the semivowels used four positions and filled four; the sibilants use three and fill three. Each group is complete with respect to the sounds Sanskrit actually has at those points, which is why the chart looks systematic without any group being padded to match another.