Ranjana Da

Da is the third cell of the dental row, the plain voiced dental, and it stands to Ta as Ga stands to Ka. By the fourth row of the grid the scheme is entirely predictable, and the value of that predictability is worth stating: a reader who has forgotten the shape of a letter can still say what sound belongs in its cell, and a scribe who has miscounted can find the error by reciting the row. Sanskrit uses this consonant heavily, and it stands in a pair with the retroflex of the row above that separates different words, so the distinction has to be kept.

In Ranjana the letter is written as any consonant sign, with the inherent short a already present, hanging from the head stroke and taking its vowel marks in the four positions the script uses. Like every consonant in the chart it can be joined with a following consonant into a single stacked form, which in a dense passage of Sanskrit happens often enough that the joined shapes are as much a part of reading the script as the plain letters. The predictability also has a bearing on how such a script can be recovered. Where a manuscript is damaged, a reader who knows the order can often say what letter must have stood in a gap, because the grid constrains the possibilities in a way an alphabet does not.

The horizontal bar that runs along the top of a line of Ranjana is not a rule drawn first and written under. It is part of each letter, and it joins across a word as the writing proceeds, so the line grows with the hand. That has consequences a reader can use. Word divisions in the northern Brahmic scripts are shown by breaks in the bar rather than only by spaces, so the eye can find the boundaries of a word by following the top of the line. It also means that a text with the bar broken in the wrong places is harder to read rather than merely untidy. In Ranjana the bar carries additional weight because the script is a display hand: it is heavy, it contrasts with the fine strokes beneath, and it gives a panel of writing the ruled appearance that made the script attractive for ornament.

When Tibetan traditions adopted the script as Lantsa, that strong horizontal is a large part of what it was adopting, since a band of writing with a firm top edge sits well in a border or across a lintel and reads clearly at a distance. The bar is also the feature that a typeface has to get right before anything else. A Ranjana font whose head strokes do not meet cleanly across a word produces a broken line, and a broken line in this script reads as a series of wrong word divisions rather than as a minor flaw in the setting.