Va and the Sounds a Chart Cannot Fix

A writing system inherited with a phonetic description attached has a particular relationship with change. The description is fixed and the speaking is not, so over centuries the letters come to record what a sound was rather than what it is, and readers of different regions read the same letter differently without anyone regarding the chart as wrong. Va is a good example, since its value varies across the languages that use Brahmic scripts, and so is the aspirated labial, which in several modern languages has shifted towards a fricative. Ranjana carries the classical description because it carries the classical chart, and it was used chiefly for Sanskrit, where the description held.

When the same letters were turned to Nepal Bhasa, a Tibeto-Burman language of the Valley with a different sound system, the fit was necessarily looser, and it is at exactly that join that the unsettled questions about the script's inventory arise. What the chart states securely is the inherited series; what a particular community made of it in a particular century is a separate question and often a harder one. That is the ordinary condition of an inherited writing system rather than a defect in it, and it is the reason a chart is better read as a record of an analysis than as a guide to pronunciation in any given place.