Nna: The Ranjana Letter

Nna is the fifth and last cell of the retroflex row, the nasal made with the tongue tip curled back. It closes the third class in the same way the velar and palatal nasals close the first two, and it stands to the dental nasal of the following row exactly as the retroflex stops stand to the dental ones: a separate consonant, not a variant. Sanskrit distinguishes the two nasals in ordinary words, and a rule of the language turns a dental nasal into this retroflex one under stated conditions elsewhere in a word, which is one of the sound changes the grammatical tradition describes at length.

The letter is therefore common. In Ranjana it is written as any consonant, hanging from the head stroke with the inherent short a already present, and it enters joined forms freely. Its position in the chart is where the retroflex class ends and the dental class begins, the two rows that most often need to be told apart and that the order deliberately places side by side. The letter also illustrates how much of Sanskrit spelling follows from rule rather than from habit. A scribe who knows the rule that produces the retroflex nasal does not have to remember which words take it, which is a considerable saving in a language whose vocabulary is built by combination.