Vocalic Ll and Counting the Ranjana Letters

Asking how many letters Ranjana has turns out to be a question with more than one answer, and this letter is at the edge of it. Counting the independent vowels of the classical series gives fourteen, and counting the consonants gives thirty three, which is the forty seven letters recorded here. Charts that include the anusvara and visarga, the marks for a nasal and a final breath, count higher; charts that drop the two vocalic l letters as unusable count lower; and charts made for writing Nepal Bhasa rather than Sanskrit raise a further question, because the Newar language has six aspirated sonorants that Sanskrit lacks and it is not settled whether Ranjana counts those as letters or writes them as combinations with ha.

The atlas records that last point as an open question rather than deciding it, since resolving it would need the alphabet primers used to teach the script in the Kathmandu Valley, or the encoding proposals put to the Unicode committee. What can be said without hesitation is the part every source shares, the fourteen vowels and thirty three consonants of the inherited series, and vocalic ll is a member of that agreed set even though nobody writes it. Counting is not a pedantic exercise here. For a script with no character standard, the count is the inventory, and the inventory is what a typeface designer implements, what a teacher puts on a chart and what an encoding proposal has to argue for. Getting it wrong in either direction has consequences for a small community's ability to write its own language.