Ranjana Tta

Tta opens the third row of the consonant grid, the retroflex class, and is its plain voiceless member. A retroflex consonant is made with the tip of the tongue curled back to touch the roof of the mouth behind the ridge of the teeth, and the sound is distinctly different from the dental made just behind the teeth, which occupies the following row. The two rows are the pair that most often defeats a learner from outside South Asia, because many languages have only one t and hear the two as versions of it. Sanskrit treats them as separate consonants in every position, so the chart carries ten letters where such a language would need five.

Ranjana inherits both rows and writes them as it writes any consonants. Retroflexion is one of the defining features of the South Asian linguistic area, shared across languages of quite different families, and a script that carries a full retroflex row is a script made for that part of the world regardless of which language it happens to be writing at any moment. The row also has a consequence for anyone reading Sanskrit in Latin script. Because most keyboards cannot produce the dot that marks a retroflex, a great deal of transliterated material silently merges the two rows, and a reader working only from such text has no way to recover the distinction the script keeps carefully.

The retroflex row is a good illustration of how a script family carries information about geography as well as about language. Retroflex consonants are found across South Asia in languages that are not related to each other, and their presence in a writing system is one of the marks of the region. A Brahmic script taken far from its home therefore arrives with a row of letters that the local language may not need. Ranjana is a case in point twice over.

In the Kathmandu Valley it was used to write Sanskrit, which has the full retroflex series, and Nepal Bhasa, which is a Tibeto-Burman language with a different inventory; and in Tibetan use, under the name Lantsa, it was used for Sanskrit syllables in a language whose own script handles retroflexion by a separate device. The letters travel whether or not they are needed, because the chart is inherited as a unit. That is the same conservatism that keeps the vocalic liquids among the vowels, and it is why a Brahmic chart is a better guide to the tradition's analysis than to any single language's sound system. There is a second reason the letters travel. Sanskrit itself travelled, and a script used to write Sanskrit needs the full Sanskrit inventory wherever it goes. Ranjana's work in Tibetan settings was almost entirely Sanskrit work, so the retroflex row was needed there in a way it was not needed for the Valley's own vernacular.