Devanagari Dha ध

Dha is the nineteenth consonant of the varnamala, the voiced aspirated dental and the fourth member of the fourth varga. It opens two of the words most often carried untranslated into English from the Indian traditions. The first is the term for the order or duty that holds things in their proper place, a word whose sense differs substantially between the Hindu, Buddhist and Jain traditions and which has an entry of its own in this atlas. The second is the term for sustained meditative absorption, which passed into Chinese as chan and from there into Japanese as zen, so that a school of Japanese Buddhism carries a transliteration of this Sanskrit word as its name. Both are examples of vocabulary that travelled with the traditions rather than being translated by them.

The letter itself is described by its coordinates in the table: dental, voiced, aspirated, fourth in the fourth class, immediately before the dental nasal. Its breathy voicing is the same feature that distinguishes the fourth member of every other class, and it is one of the sounds Sanskrit preserved from its Indo-European ancestor where most of the related languages did not. Neither word is unusual in its sounds and neither has any relation to the other beyond the letter they share. They are mentioned together because both belong to the small set of Sanskrit terms that English borrowed without translating, which is a fact about the history of English and about how these traditions travelled, rather than anything about the letter that happens to open them both.

The history of these two words is a good illustration of how the vocabulary of the Indian traditions spread and of what happened to the sounds on the way. Neither was translated when Buddhism moved north and east; both were transliterated into the receiving scripts, adapted to the sound systems of the receiving languages, and then inherited by later languages from those adaptations. The word for meditative absorption lost its aspirated dental entirely in Chinese, which has no such sound, and reached Japanese as a single syllable that shares little with the Sanskrit original beyond a line of descent.

The word for order and duty travelled with its own set of adaptations, and it is now naturalised in English with a range of senses that no single Indian tradition would recognise as its own. What this atlas records for the letter is its place and articulation, both attested in the grammatical literature. The word histories are recorded because they are facts about words that begin with the letter, and they are marked as such, not offered as meanings the sign carries. In a script whose letters are named by their own sounds and have no inherited names of the kind Greek and Hebrew letters carry, there is no mechanism by which a word's meaning could attach itself to a letter, and this atlas does not pretend otherwise.