Ṅanga ਙ

Ṅanga is the tenth letter of the Gurmukhi painti and the fifth and final member of the velar series. Every series in a Brahmic alphabet ends with a nasal made at the same point in the mouth as the four stops that precede it, and Ṅanga fills that slot for the velars: the closure is made at the back of the mouth, as for Kakka, but the air is released through the nose. English writes the same sound with the two letters ng, and has no single sign for it. Gurmukhi has the sign but rarely uses it. The reason is that the script also carries two small nasal marks, the tippi and the bindi, written above the letter, and those marks do almost all the work of nasality in ordinary Punjabi spelling.

Where a velar nasal occurs, which in Punjabi is very largely before another velar consonant, the tippi over the preceding letter is what a writer actually puts on the page. Ṅanga as a full letter is therefore confined to a small class of words and to learned spellings, and most Punjabi readers encounter it chiefly in the recitation of the alphabet. That does not make it decorative. The five series are a system, and a system with a hole in it cannot be taught; the letter earns its place by completing the pattern that lets a learner predict where every other letter sits.

The scarcity of Ṅanga on the page is the visible end of a decision the script makes about nasal sounds. Gurmukhi has five nasal letters, one closing each series, and two diacritic marks, the tippi and the bindi. The marks are not interchangeable. Broadly, the tippi is written above a letter to nasalise where the vowel is short or where the syllable is closed, and the bindi where the vowel is long or open, so a writer chooses between them on the shape of the syllable rather than on the sound of the nasal. That division of labour makes Punjabi spelling economical: instead of writing a nasal consonant before every stop, the script marks the nasality once and lets the following consonant supply its quality.

The consequence for a reader of the Guru Granth Sahib is that nasal marks are among the smallest and most easily missed features of a manuscript page, and among the most consequential, since the presence or absence of a tippi can distinguish two words. Copyists were therefore held to the marks as strictly as to the letters, and the comparison of early manuscript volumes has paid close attention to them. The five series nasals, Ṅanga among them, sit behind that system as its explanation rather than as its everyday tools.