Ṅanga and How Gurmukhi Writes Nasality

The scarcity of Ṅanga on the page is the visible end of a decision the script makes about nasal sounds. Gurmukhi has five nasal letters, one closing each series, and two diacritic marks, the tippi and the bindi. The marks are not interchangeable. Broadly, the tippi is written above a letter to nasalise where the vowel is short or where the syllable is closed, and the bindi where the vowel is long or open, so a writer chooses between them on the shape of the syllable rather than on the sound of the nasal. That division of labour makes Punjabi spelling economical: instead of writing a nasal consonant before every stop, the script marks the nasality once and lets the following consonant supply its quality.

The consequence for a reader of the Guru Granth Sahib is that nasal marks are among the smallest and most easily missed features of a manuscript page, and among the most consequential, since the presence or absence of a tippi can distinguish two words. Copyists were therefore held to the marks as strictly as to the letters, and the comparison of early manuscript volumes has paid close attention to them. The five series nasals, Ṅanga among them, sit behind that system as its explanation rather than as its everyday tools.