Nga: The Nasal That Closes the Velar Class

Nga is the fifth consonant of the varnamala, the velar nasal and the closing member of the first varga. Every varga ends with the nasal made at its own place of articulation, so the five nasals of Sanskrit are distributed one to each class, and that distribution is the clearest single demonstration that the table is organised by anatomy rather than by inheritance. A nasal is a stop in which the closure in the mouth is complete but the soft palate is lowered so the air escapes through the nose, and there is therefore exactly one possible nasal for each point of closure. The grammarians put each where it belongs.

In Sanskrit the velar nasal never begins a word and occurs almost entirely before a velar stop, where it is simply the nasal the mouth produces when the following closure is at the soft palate. English has the same sound in the middle and at the end of words and never at the beginning, for the same reason. The consequence is that the independent letter is comparatively rare on a Devanagari page even though the sound itself is common in speech: what a reader usually sees is the nasal written as part of a conjunct with the stop that follows it, or replaced by the anusvara, the dot written above the headline that stands for a nasal whose exact quality is fixed by what comes next.