Nga and the Two Ways to Write a Nasal

A script that carries five nasal letters also carries a shortcut, and the tension between the two is one of the small practical questions a scribe of any Brahmic script has to settle. Beside the five class nasals stands the anusvara, a single mark written above the head stroke that indicates a nasal whose exact quality is determined by whatever consonant follows. Where the following consonant makes the quality predictable, either sign will do, and manuscript practice varies. Using the mark is quicker and takes less room on a line; using the full letter is more explicit and looks more formal.

In an ornamental hand written for display the choice is also an aesthetic one, since a mark above the bar keeps the syllable narrow while a full nasal letter widens it and changes the rhythm of a panel. Ranjana was used chiefly where the page mattered, on covers, in headings and in the writing of mantras, so these were live decisions rather than incidental ones. This is the kind of detail a modern typeface has to reproduce as well, and it is one of the reasons that digitising an unencoded script is harder than drawing its letters: the shapes are only part of the problem, and the behaviour is the rest.