Ma: The Last of the Twenty-Five Stops

Ma is the twenty-fifth consonant of the varnamala, the labial nasal and the closing member of the fifth varga, and with it the twenty-five stops come to an end. It is made by closing the lips while the soft palate is lowered so the air escapes through the nose, and it is the most frequent of the five nasals after the dental. It behaves more freely than the velar, palatal and retroflex nasals, beginning words and standing at their ends, though less freely than the dental. The letter has a further role in the writing system.

A nasal at the end of a word before a pause is realised as this sound, and the anusvara, the dot written above the headline that marks a nasal whose quality is otherwise determined by what follows, is read as this sound in that position. So a reader meets the letter both written out and standing behind the dot, and knowing when the dot means this nasal rather than another is part of reading the script. Its written form descends through the Nagari hands from a Brahmi original of the same value. Because a word-final nasal becomes this sound before a pause, it also ends a very large number of Sanskrit words as they are actually recited, including the accusative singular of a major noun class and the nominative and accusative of the neuter. A reciter therefore produces the sound far more often than a count of the written letter would suggest, since much of that frequency is carried by the nasal mark rather than by the letter itself.