Na: The Nasal That Behaves Like a Full Consonant

Na is the twentieth consonant of the varnamala, the dental nasal and the closing member of the fourth varga. It is by a wide margin the commonest of the five nasals and the only one that freely begins words in Sanskrit. The velar and palatal nasals are confined to positions before stops of their own class; the retroflex nasal appears very largely as the product of a rule converting this letter in certain environments; the labial nasal sits between the two behaviours. The dental nasal alone behaves as a fully independent consonant, occurring at the start, middle and end of words with no conditioning, which is why a reader meets it constantly on a page while three of its four fellows are seldom written on their own. That difference is invisible in a chart showing five equal signs and is worth stating explicitly.

The letter is also the source of most retroflex nasals in written Sanskrit, since the rule that converts it operates over a wide range of forms and applies across the internal boundaries of compounds. A reader who sees the retroflex nasal is generally looking at this letter after the rule has applied. Its combining form is one of the commonest signs on a Devanagari page, because clusters of the dental nasal with a following dental stop run through the noun and verb endings and therefore through every sentence. A learner who has mastered the independent letter and not the combining form will stall on entirely ordinary words, which is why primers teach the two together rather than in sequence.