Rara and What a Subjoined Letter Does

A subjoined letter in Gurmukhi is not an abbreviation and not an ornament. It records that two consonants meet with no vowel between them, which in an abugida is information that has to be written explicitly, because the default assumption is that every consonant carries an inherent a. Without some device to say otherwise, a sequence of two consonant signs would be read as two syllables. Devanagari solves the problem with stacked conjuncts and with a mark that cancels the inherent vowel; Gurmukhi solves it with three subjoined forms and, in modern usage, largely by convention and context. The narrowing is a genuine loss of precision that Punjabi absorbs because its phonology tolerates it, and the older scriptural orthography is noticeably more explicit than modern spelling on exactly this point.

For a reader of the Guru Granth Sahib, the subjoined Rara is therefore one of the marks that distinguishes the page of the scripture from an ordinary page of Punjabi, in the same way the subjoined Haha does. Anyone building type or fonts for the scripture has to implement those forms correctly, and a font that renders modern Punjabi acceptably may still fail on a scriptural text without any obvious sign that something has gone wrong.