Devanagari Da द

Da is the eighteenth consonant of the varnamala, the voiced unaspirated dental and the third member of the fourth varga. It is among the most frequent consonants in Sanskrit and in the modern languages that use the script, and it opens a wide range of ordinary and technical vocabulary. Its relation to the letters around it is the relation that holds in every varga: it is the dental of the class's first letter with voicing added, and the letter that follows it is itself with aspiration added. The consistency of that scheme across all five classes is what allows the grammatical tradition to refer to a sound by its coordinates in the table rather than by name, and it is what makes the twenty-five stops learnable as a system rather than as a list.

Like the other dentals it is a true dental, made with the tongue tip at the teeth rather than on the ridge behind them, and like them it participates heavily in the sandhi rules that operate at word joins. A word-final dental is common in Sanskrit and its treatment before a following sound is one of the first parts of the sandhi system a learner meets. It is also among the letters whose combining behaviour a learner meets earliest, because clusters of a dental with a following semivowel occur throughout ordinary Sanskrit vocabulary and appear on almost any page. Reading those compound signs fluently is the step between knowing the alphabet and reading the script, and it is a distinct stage of learning rather than a refinement of the first one.

Some letters of the varnamala are used constantly and others almost never, and the table gives no sign of the difference. The dentals are among the heaviest used; the vocalic liquids and several of the retroflexes are among the lightest. A learner working from a chart of forty-seven equal squares will not know which is which, and will spend the same effort on a letter confined to forms of one verbal root as on one that opens a tenth of the vocabulary. This atlas states the frequency where it is worth stating, because it is a fact about the language that the chart conceals. What frequency does not tell you is anything about importance in the traditions that use the script.

The letters given the most weight in the religious literature are chosen for reasons that have nothing to do with how often they occur: the first sound of the alphabet, the sounds of Om, the last consonant of the table. Those selections are made by the traditions and are recorded here as theirs, sourced to the scholarly literature that describes them, rather than being inferred from the shape of the table or extended by analogy to letters no tradition singled out. This atlas therefore records frequency where it is known and marks it as frequency, and records a tradition's selection where a tradition made one and marks it as that tradition's. Keeping the two apart is what stops a reference work from manufacturing significance out of a statistic, or from quietly promoting a common letter into an important one because there was more to say about it.