Ṅanga: The Gurmukhi Letter

Ṅanga is the tenth letter of the Gurmukhi painti and the fifth and final member of the velar series. Every series in a Brahmic alphabet ends with a nasal made at the same point in the mouth as the four stops that precede it, and Ṅanga fills that slot for the velars: the closure is made at the back of the mouth, as for Kakka, but the air is released through the nose. English writes the same sound with the two letters ng, and has no single sign for it. Gurmukhi has the sign but rarely uses it. The reason is that the script also carries two small nasal marks, the tippi and the bindi, written above the letter, and those marks do almost all the work of nasality in ordinary Punjabi spelling.

Where a velar nasal occurs, which in Punjabi is very largely before another velar consonant, the tippi over the preceding letter is what a writer actually puts on the page. Ṅanga as a full letter is therefore confined to a small class of words and to learned spellings, and most Punjabi readers encounter it chiefly in the recitation of the alphabet. That does not make it decorative. The five series are a system, and a system with a hole in it cannot be taught; the letter earns its place by completing the pattern that lets a learner predict where every other letter sits.