Nanna ਨ

Nanna is the twenty-fifth letter of the Gurmukhi painti and closes the dental series. It writes a dental n, made with the tongue tip against the upper teeth, and it is by a considerable margin the most used of the five series nasals. Where Ṅanga and Ñanja are almost never written as full letters and Ṇana keeps a narrower range, Nanna is a general purpose consonant that appears at the beginning, in the middle and at the end of words throughout Punjabi and throughout the language of the Guru Granth Sahib. Punjabi holds it distinct from the retroflex nasal five letters earlier, and the contrast between the two is one of the pairs a learner from outside the region has to be trained to hear.

Nanna is written as a stem from the headline with a shallow open bowl, an uncomplicated shape that stays legible even in a hurried hand, and its frequency means it is among the first consonants a beginner reads fluently rather than decodes. It also carries a good deal of grammatical work, appearing in verb endings and in the particles that mark relationships between words, so a reader who cannot recognise it quickly is slowed down everywhere rather than occasionally. Its position at the end of the dental row also makes it the last of the letters a learner meets before the alphabet moves to the lips, so in the recitation of the painti it marks the point at which four of the five series are complete and the pattern has been fully demonstrated.

The letters of the painti are very unevenly used, and the distribution is worth knowing for reasons beyond curiosity. A high frequency letter such as Nanna, Dadda or Sassa appears in almost every line, so its form is what a reader recognises without conscious effort and what a scribe writes most automatically. That has three consequences. In palaeography, the treatment of the commonest letters characterises a hand more reliably than the treatment of a rare one, because there are hundreds of instances to compare rather than a handful.

In typography, the commonest letters set the colour of the page, so a fount that renders them a little too heavy or too narrow will look wrong overall even when every individual letter is defensible. And in teaching, the commonest letters are what make early reading possible, since a learner who knows twelve letters well can read more than one who knows thirty poorly. Traditional teaching of the painti runs in strict order regardless, because the order is part of the inheritance being passed on, but materials for second language learners frequently reorder on exactly this ground. Nanna would appear early in any such reordering and late in none, which is a fair summary of its place in the script.