Aa and the Weight of a Mark

Vowel length is the kind of distinction that a writing system can afford to lose and Sanskrit cannot. Verse in the classical metres is quantitative, built from patterns of heavy and light syllables rather than from stress, and a syllable is heavy in part because its vowel is long. A scribe who dropped the mark that turns a into aa would not merely misspell a word but break the metre of a line, and in a manuscript tradition whose texts are chanted, that is an audible fault rather than a silent one.

Ranjana was the hand chosen in the Kathmandu Valley for exactly the material where such faults matter most, the Sanskrit of Buddhist scripture and the mantras that accompany it, and the discipline of copying carried the same weight there as it does in any scriptural tradition. The practical result is visible in the letterforms. Ranjana is written from a strong horizontal head stroke with the letters hanging beneath it, and the vowel marks attach to that stroke or run down beside the letter, so the eye can check them as a row rather than hunting through the body of each sign. The design is legible in exactly the way a text meant to be read aloud needs to be, and the mark for aa, sitting upright to the right of its consonant, is the clearest instance of it.