Vocalic R and What a Script Inherits Whole

The vocalic liquids are the clearest evidence that Ranjana did not develop its inventory from the language spoken around it. Nepal Bhasa, the language of the Newar people, is Tibeto-Burman and has no syllabic r of this kind; Sanskrit, which Ranjana was chiefly used to write in the Kathmandu Valley, has one and uses it in some of its commonest words, including the name of the Rigveda. The letter is in the script because the whole varnamala came into the Valley as a unit, with its order, its classification and its grammatical apparatus attached, and a script family that arrives that way keeps its full inventory whether the local language needs it or not. That is worth stating plainly because it explains something about how these scripts behave.

Letters that a language does not use are not quietly dropped; they are taught, drawn on charts, and kept in the recitation, and they surface whenever a Sanskrit word is quoted or a mantra is written. For Ranjana the Sanskrit case is not marginal but central, since the script's principal work in Newar Buddhism was the copying of Sanskrit scripture and the writing of Sanskrit mantras, so a letter that is unnecessary for the local vernacular is unremarkable in the material the script actually carried.