Ta: The Ranjana Letter

Ta opens the fourth row of the consonant grid, the dental class, and is its plain voiceless member. A dental consonant is made with the tongue against the back of the upper teeth, further forward than the retroflex row and further back than the labials that follow, and the sound is not quite the t of English, which is articulated at the ridge behind the teeth and falls between the two Indian categories. That is why transliterating between the systems is imprecise in both directions. Sanskrit keeps the dental and retroflex rows entirely separate and builds words on the contrast, so a script for the language must carry both, and the varnamala's decision to place them adjacently makes the pairing easy to learn and easy to check.

Ranjana writes Ta as any consonant sign, with the inherent short a and the head stroke, and the letter is among the commonest in the script because dental consonants are common in Sanskrit and in the vocabulary of Buddhist scripture in particular. The letter is also a good illustration of why hearing a distinction and writing one are different problems. A speaker whose language has a single t hears both Indian rows as that sound, and no amount of attention to the letters will produce the difference until the ear has been trained. The chart can only say which two things are being distinguished.