Devanagari Ga ग

Ga is the third consonant of the varnamala, the voiced unaspirated velar and the third member of the first varga. With it the class turns from voiceless to voiced, the vocal folds vibrating during the closure rather than only after its release, and the structure of the varga becomes visible: the third and fourth members repeat the first and second with voicing added, and the fifth is the nasal made at the same place. Knowing that pattern once means knowing where any of the twenty-five stops sits from its name alone, and the grammatical literature relies on exactly that, referring to whole groups of sounds by class and position rather than by listing them.

The letter opens a large body of familiar vocabulary. The elephant-headed deity invoked at the beginning of undertakings, the river held sacred across northern India, and the Vedic metre and the verse recited in it all have names beginning with this sound, and all three are entries elsewhere in this atlas. That frequency is a fact about the lexicon rather than about the letter, but it is the reason the sign is among the first a learner recognises on a page. Its form descends through the Nagari and Siddhamatrika hands from a Brahmi letter of the same value.

Devanagari does not write a sequence of consonants as a row of separate letters. When two or more consonants come together with no vowel between them, the script joins them into a conjunct, a single compound sign in which the earlier members are usually reduced, most often by dropping the vertical stem that most letters carry on their right. Ga is one of the letters that reduces that way, so in a cluster it appears as its own shape with the stem removed and the following consonant attached.

A page of Sanskrit is full of these compounds, and learning to read them is a distinct stage after learning the letters themselves, since a conjunct can look considerably unlike either of its parts. The system is a direct consequence of the inherent vowel. Because every consonant sign is read with a short a unless something says otherwise, the script needs a way to write a consonant with no vowel at all, and joining it to the next one is the solution it adopted; the cancelling stroke, the virama, is used mainly at the end of a word and in modern typesetting where a conjunct is unavailable. The whole arrangement descends from Brahmi, which already worked this way, and the inscriptional record that Richard Salomon's guide surveys shows the conjuncts developing alongside the letters through the intervening centuries.