Nya: The Palatal Nasal

Nya is the tenth consonant of the varnamala, the palatal nasal and the closing member of the second varga. Like the velar nasal before it, it does not begin a word in Sanskrit and occurs essentially only before a stop of its own class, where it is the nasal the palate produces naturally in that position. Its independent letter is therefore rarely written on its own, and a reader meets the sound chiefly inside conjuncts or represented by the anusvara, the dot above the headline that marks a nasal whose quality is determined by what follows. The letter's most visible appearance is in the cluster that opens the Sanskrit word for knowledge, where it joins the voiced palatal stop, and that cluster is pronounced so differently across the subcontinent that the same written word is heard as three quite distinct sequences depending on where the reader learned to read.

The letter is a good example of a sign whose position in the table is secure on phonetic grounds while its independent form is seldom needed. That combination is common in the varnamala, whose organising principle is the completeness of the analysis rather than the frequency of the signs. The letter also appears in the name of the class it closes. Each of the five vargas is named after its own first member, so the palatal class is spoken of by a compound formed on the letter that heads it, and a grammatical rule referring to that class names it the same way. The naming convention is one more piece of the machinery that lets Sanskrit grammar say a great deal in very few syllables.