The Cluster Most Readers Meet It In

The palatal nasal does not begin a word and occurs essentially only before another palatal, so like the velar nasal it lives inside conjuncts. The particular conjunct that carries most of its traffic is the one formed with the voiced palatal before it, which spells the Sanskrit word for knowledge and the whole family of terms built on the root meaning to know. Those words run through the philosophical and devotional literature of the subcontinent, and for most readers the cluster is the only place the letter is ever encountered.

What became of that cluster in the descendant scripts is one of the standard illustrations of how far a ligature can drift. In several of the northern alphabets the two letters fused into a single shape in which neither component can be made out, and the pronunciation drifted with it, so that the same written cluster is read quite differently in different modern languages. In Brahmi the two parts are still separately visible when the conjunct is written, which is one of the ways the parent script is easier for a beginner than its children. The alternative to writing the nasal letter at all is the anusvara, the dot that says a nasal is present and lets the following consonant say which.