Devanagari Nya ञ

Nya is the tenth consonant of the varnamala, the palatal nasal and the closing member of the second varga. Like the velar nasal before it, it does not begin a word in Sanskrit and occurs essentially only before a stop of its own class, where it is the nasal the palate produces naturally in that position. Its independent letter is therefore rarely written on its own, and a reader meets the sound chiefly inside conjuncts or represented by the anusvara, the dot above the headline that marks a nasal whose quality is determined by what follows. The letter's most visible appearance is in the cluster that opens the Sanskrit word for knowledge, where it joins the voiced palatal stop, and that cluster is pronounced so differently across the subcontinent that the same written word is heard as three quite distinct sequences depending on where the reader learned to read.

The letter is a good example of a sign whose position in the table is secure on phonetic grounds while its independent form is seldom needed. That combination is common in the varnamala, whose organising principle is the completeness of the analysis rather than the frequency of the signs. The letter also appears in the name of the class it closes. Each of the five vargas is named after its own first member, so the palatal class is spoken of by a compound formed on the letter that heads it, and a grammatical rule referring to that class names it the same way. The naming convention is one more piece of the machinery that lets Sanskrit grammar say a great deal in very few syllables.

It is worth setting the palatal nasal beside its neighbours to see what the table is claiming. All five nasals are real sounds of Sanskrit, and the grammarians located each at the place of articulation of its own class, which is correct and is confirmed by any modern phonetic description. But three of the five are positional, appearing only where a following stop calls for them, one is fully independent, and one sits between. A chart that shows five equal squares does not record that difference, and a learner who takes the chart at face value will expect to meet the palatal nasal at the head of words and never will. The atlas states the distribution alongside the articulation for exactly that reason.

On the symbolic side, this letter is one of the fifty matrika counted in the Tantric arrangement of the alphabet as a garland, and Andre Padoux's study of the concept of the word in the Hindu Tantras describes how the schools order and interpret the series and how far they differ from each other. What any one school attributes to this letter belongs to that school. This atlas records membership of the series and leaves the attributions where they were made. Counting the nasals also settles a question the chart raises and does not answer. Sanskrit has five nasal letters and one nasal mark, and the mark is not a sixth nasal: it is a way of writing whichever of the five the following consonant requires. The inventory of sounds and the inventory of signs therefore do not match one for one, which is true at several points in this script and is worth expecting.