Ya and the Group That Does Not Fit the Grid

The eight letters that follow the five classes are the part of a Brahmic chart where the arrangement stops being derivable and has to be learnt. Four semivowels, three sibilants and the aspirate, in that order, with no rows or columns to count from. This is worth noticing because the contrast with the grid explains something about the chart as a whole. The tradition arranged what could be arranged and listed the rest, rather than forcing every sound into a scheme that did not fit it, which is a mark of a description made honestly.

For a reader of Ranjana specifically it has a practical consequence: correspondences between Ranjana and its relatives are most secure inside the grid, where a cell can be identified by counting, and require more care outside it, where the order is a list. The atlas states its Ranjana correspondences on that basis. A Ranjana letter and its Devanagari or Brahmi counterpart occupy the same position in the same inherited series, and for the letters after the grid that position is a place in a fixed list rather than a coordinate, which is a slightly weaker but still perfectly checkable kind of fact. The point applies to any letter list of this kind. Where an order is derivable it can be checked; where it is a list it has to be attested, and saying which is which is part of recording it honestly.