A Letter Met Inside Other Letters

The velar nasal never begins a word in Sanskrit or in the Prakrit of the inscriptions and occurs essentially only immediately before another velar. Its whole life is therefore spent inside conjuncts, stacked above the stop it precedes, and the independent sign standing alone is a rarity on the page. That distribution is not an accident of vocabulary. The sound is what a nasal becomes when it is made at the same point as a following velar stop, and a language that assimilates its nasals to the following consonant will produce it in exactly one environment and nowhere else.

Sanskrit orthography gives a writer a choice about how to record it. A class nasal standing before a stop of its own class may be written with the nasal letter itself, forming a conjunct, or with the anusvara, a dot placed above the line that says a nasal is present and lets the following consonant determine which one. Both practices are old, both appear in manuscripts, and neither is wrong. The choice affects how often this letter is actually written, and it is one of the reasons a count of letters in a text is a poorer guide to the sound system than it looks. Where the dot is used the sound is present and the letter is not.