Ranjana Ai

Ai is the twelfth letter of the Ranjana varnamala, the second of the compound vowels, and the open counterpart of e. The grammatical analysis derives it in the same way, as the result of a combining with a vowel of the palatal group, but from the longer forms, which is why the tradition ranks it as the fuller or more open of the pair. In the classical pronunciation it is a long vowel of the front of the mouth, more open than e, and like e it has no short partner, so it stands alone in the series rather than in a pair. Its mark is written above the head stroke, in the same register as the mark for e and distinguished from it by shape, and the independent letter shown here appears where the vowel opens a word.

The pairing of e with ai and of o with au is a real structural fact rather than a mnemonic. It is why the last four letters of the vowel series run in that order, and why a reader who has learnt to distinguish the two marks above the line has learnt half the compound vowels at once. There is a further reason the compound vowels are grouped at the end rather than slotted among the simple ones. Sanskrit sound change works by combining vowels at the joins between words, and the compounds are what those combinations produce, so listing them separately keeps the derived apart from the given. A chart that mixed them would obscure the rule, and the rule is the point of the chart. Ranjana takes the arrangement over unchanged, as it takes the rest of the order, and adds nothing to it but its own hand.

Every script needs a way to settle what its letters are, and most modern scripts have one in the character standard that encodes them. Ranjana does not. It has no Unicode allocation at all: a provisional slot exists on the roadmap and proposals have been put forward, but nothing is encoded, so there is no code point for ai or for any other Ranjana letter, and this atlas stores no character for them. What it stores instead is a drawing, a vector outline taken from an openly licensed Ranjana typeface, which is the same route already used here for other unencoded scripts. Two easier answers were available and both are wrong.

Storing a Devanagari or Newa character in place of a Ranjana one asserts that the letters are the same letter, which they are not; the Newa block encodes Prachalit, a different script used by the same community for the same languages. Drawing the letterforms by hand would be worse, since inventing shapes for a living liturgical script is a fabrication however carefully done. The outline route keeps the shape true to a real typeface and keeps the record honest about what is stored, which matters most for a script whose users are a small community still writing it. The absence of an encoding is not a historical curiosity but a present constraint. It means Ranjana cannot be searched, cannot be spell checked, cannot be reliably carried between one program and another, and cannot be read by the assistive software a visually impaired reader depends on. Whatever the eventual encoding decides, that decision will be made partly on the basis of charts and proposals rather than on the basis of the manuscripts, which is why the unsettled questions about the script's own inventory carry more weight than they otherwise would.