Na: The Ranjana Letter

Na is the fifth and last cell of the dental row, the nasal made at the teeth. It is the commonest of the five class nasals in Sanskrit and the one that stands closest to the n of English, so a reader arriving from a Latin alphabet finds it the most familiar letter in the nasal column. Its distinction from the retroflex nasal of the row above is real and does separate words, and a rule of Sanskrit converts one into the other under stated conditions, which the grammatical tradition describes carefully. With Na the fourth class is complete and only the labials remain, so a learner reaching this point has covered twenty of the twenty five stops and has seen the pattern four times.

Ranjana writes the letter as any consonant, with the inherent short a and the head bar, taking vowel marks around it and joining with a following consonant where no vowel intervenes. The letter is also a reminder that familiarity can mislead. The nasal that looks most like an English n is a dental made against the teeth rather than the alveolar n of English, so even the easiest correspondence in the chart is an approximation, and the same caution applies to every letter in it. What the chart states exactly is a position, and the position is what a reader should trust.