Siddham Nna 𑖜

Nna is the retroflex nasal and closes the third class. In classical Sanskrit most of its occurrences are not lexical at all: they are produced by a rule that converts the dental nasal into this one when certain retroflex or r-like sounds have occurred earlier in the same word, sometimes at a distance of several syllables.

A reader who knows the rule can very often predict the letter, and a scribe who does not know it writes the wrong nasal. That is a different kind of literacy from recognising shapes, and it is one reason the study of the script in East Asia was inseparable from the study of the grammar standing behind it. A manual of the letters that did not also teach the rules would produce copyists who could draw the syllabary and not write the language.

The letter closes its class as the other four classes are closed, by the nasal made at the point of articulation the class is named for. Taken together the five nasals are among the most durable results of the Indian analysis of speech, and they are the part of the table that most clearly cannot be reproduced by any Mediterranean alphabet.

On the page it enters conjuncts freely with the stops of its own class, and it takes the vowel marks and the inherent short a like any other consonant sign.

Sanskrit adjusts its sounds at every junction, inside a word and between words, according to a set of rules the grammarians set out exhaustively. Vowels merge, consonants assimilate to what follows, a final consonant changes according to the first sound of the next word, and nasals and sibilants shift between their dental and retroflex forms under stated conditions.

The script records the result and not the input. What is written is the adjusted form, so a reader is always working backwards, and separating a line of Siddham into its words is an act of grammatical analysis rather than of recognition. In a script that also runs its words together without spaces, as Indian manuscript practice often does, the analysis is the reading.

That has a direct consequence for how the script could be taught in East Asia. A student who learned the letters alone could copy a Sanskrit text accurately, produce the syllables of a dharani correctly and recognise a seed syllable on an image, all of which were the point. Construing a sentence was another matter and required the grammar, which is why the Japanese tradition of Siddham study produced letter manuals in quantity and grammatical study only alongside them.

The distinction between copying a script and reading a language is real, and the shittan tradition sits deliberately on one side of it.