Ñanja: The Gurmukhi Letter

Ñanja is the fifteenth letter of the Gurmukhi painti and closes the palatal series, holding the nasal slot that Ṅanga holds for the velars. The sound is made with the tongue against the hard palate and the air released through the nose, the consonant heard in the Spanish word senor or the French word agneau. In written Punjabi the letter is rare. The sound occurs almost exclusively before another palatal consonant, and in that position Gurmukhi writes a tippi or a bindi over the preceding letter rather than the full nasal, so a reader may go a long way through a book without meeting Ñanja on the page. Its place in the alphabet is nonetheless secure, because a Brahmic series is defined by its five slots and an alphabet that omitted the nasals would no longer be teaching the system that makes the rest of it predictable.

Ñanja is thus a letter whose value is structural, and the painti keeps it for the same reason a table keeps an empty cell that shows where a category would fall. The comparison with Ṅanga is instructive because the two letters are rare for the same reason but not to the same degree. Both are displaced by the nasal marks, and both occur chiefly before consonants of their own series, but the palatal environment is the narrower of the two, so Ñanja is the less often written of the pair. Neither is a dead letter: both appear in Sanskritic vocabulary carried into Punjabi, and both are part of what a reader must know in order to read the scriptural register rather than only the modern one.