Bhabbha ਭ

Bhabbha is the twenty-ninth letter of the Gurmukhi painti and the fourth member of the labial series, occupying the voiced aspirate slot for the last time in the alphabet. Historically it wrote a b released with voice and breath together. In most modern Punjabi it does not write a consonant at all: like the voiced aspirates of the velar, palatal, retroflex and dental rows, it has lost both aspiration and voicing and left a tone in their place, so a syllable spelled with Bhabbha is pronounced with a distinctive pitch and the pitch is what a listener hears. With this letter the tonal set is complete. Punjabi has no mark for tone and never acquired one, and the whole of the system is carried by these letters together with Haha, read in combination with where they fall in the word.

Bhabbha is common in Punjabi and in the language of the Guru Granth Sahib, so a reader meets the question constantly. Its written form is a stem carrying a bowl and an additional loop, and in a rapid hand it is one of the pairs that has to be distinguished from its plain partner by attention rather than by an obvious difference of outline. Bhabbha also closes the ordered part of the alphabet in a way worth noticing. The velar row opened the grid with a set of contrasts that the palatal, retroflex and dental rows then repeated, and by the labial row a learner is confirming a pattern rather than acquiring one. The voiced aspirate slot is the fourth of five in each row, so this letter is the twenty-ninth of thirty-five and the second to last consonant the grid has anything to say about.

It is worth setting the tonal letters out together, because taken singly each looks like an anomaly and taken together they are a system. Gurmukhi has four voiced aspirate letters, one each in the velar, palatal, dental and labial series, and Ḍhaddha in the retroflex series makes five. In the older language each wrote a consonant.

In most modern Punjabi none of them does, and each instead signals that the syllable carries a tone, with the particular tone determined by whether the letter stands at the beginning of the word or later in it. Haha behaves comparably in a large class of words. Nothing else in the writing system marks tone, and no diacritic was ever introduced for it, so the whole of a genuinely phonemic feature of the language is recoverable only from a set of consonant letters that no longer name what they write.

Linguists describe Punjabi as the only major Indo-Aryan language to have developed lexical tone, and this group of letters is the written record of how it happened. The atlas records the older value and the modern one side by side for each letter rather than choosing between them, because both are current: the older reading survives in learned and liturgical recitation and the modern one is what is spoken.