Nna and the Five Nasals in the Order

Placing each nasal at the end of its own class rather than gathering the nasals together is one of the arrangement's quiet strengths, and it takes a moment to see why. A nasal is made at a point of articulation just as a stop is, so it belongs with the stops made at the same point, and grouping them by manner instead would break the correspondence the chart exists to show. It also matches how the language behaves, since a nasal before a consonant assimilates to that consonant's class, and the chart's arrangement puts each nasal next to the sounds it will assimilate to. The recitation reinforces the logic: a class is said as a unit and ends on its nasal, so the ear learns the grouping before the eye does.

Ranjana carries the arrangement unchanged, as every script of the family does. This is why a Ranjana chart, a Devanagari chart and a Brahmi chart can be laid side by side and read across, and why the correspondences between them can be stated with confidence letter by letter rather than being guessed from shape. It is also why the correspondences recorded in this atlas can be stated as facts about position rather than as impressions about shape. Two letters that occupy the same cell of the same inherited grid are the same letter of the same series, whatever their drawings look like.