Alphabet Letters
Devanagari Jha झ
Devanagari Letters
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Origin Devanagari forms settle between roughly the seventh and the tenth centuries CE, descending from Brahmi through the Gupta and Nagari hands
Jha is the ninth consonant of the varnamala, the voiced aspirated palatal and the fourth member of the second varga. It is uncommon in Sanskrit vocabulary, occurring in few inherited words, but it is well used in the modern languages that write with Devanagari, where it appears in ordinary Hindi and Marathi words and in surnames. That difference between the classical and the modern frequency of a letter is worth noticing: the varnamala was fixed as a table of Sanskrit sounds, and the languages that later adopted the script filled its places at their own rates and in some cases added new letters beside them.
Facts
Origins
Origin PeriodDevanagari forms settle between roughly the seventh and the tenth centuries CE, descending from Brahmi through the Gupta and Nagari hands 3Tradition: Indian epigraphy Place of OriginNorthern India 3Tradition: Indian epigraphy Origin of the NameNamed by its own sound plus the inherent short a. Devanagari letter names carry no word meaning, unlike the Greek and Semitic names 1Tradition: Sanskrit phonetics of the grammarians Sense of the NameThe voiced aspirated palatal; rare in inherited Sanskrit vocabulary but common in modern Hindi and Marathi words. 2 Attestation
Meaning in the Attesting SourceCounted among the matrika, the fifty little mothers of the letter-garland; the count belongs to the series, not to this letter alone 4Tradition: Hindu Tantra, the garland of letters A property of the fifty-letter series. Individual schools assign further correspondences that differ between traditions and are not adopted here. Identity
Script TypeConsonant sign of a Brahmi-derived abugida; it carries the inherent short a unless a dependent vowel sign is written 1 PositionNinth consonant of the varnamala, fourth member of the palatal class 1Tradition: Sanskrit phonetics of the grammarians Attributions
Associated SoundVoiced aspirated palatal. Rare in Sanskrit vocabulary and common in the modern languages written with Devanagari 2Tradition: Sanskrit phonetics of the grammarians Learn More
Jha: A Letter Sanskrit Barely Used and Hindi Does
Jha is the ninth consonant of the varnamala, the voiced aspirated palatal and the fourth member of the second varga. It is uncommon in Sanskrit, occurring in few inherited words, and the grammars note its rarity. In the modern languages written with Devanagari it is a different matter: it appears in ordinary Hindi and Marathi vocabulary and in a number of common surnames, and a speaker of those languages uses it without thinking of it as unusual. That gap between the classical and the modern frequency of a single letter is worth noticing, because it says something about what the varnamala is and what happened to it.
The table was fixed as an analysis of the sounds of Sanskrit. When later languages adopted the script they inherited the whole table, including places that Sanskrit filled thinly, and they filled those places at their own rates from their own vocabulary. The table did not change to match, because its authority came from being the classical arrangement rather than from being a census of any particular language's usage. What the modern languages did add, where they needed sounds the table had no place for, they added as marked variants of existing letters rather than as new positions.
One Table, Several Languages
Devanagari today writes Hindi, Marathi, Nepali and a number of other languages besides Sanskrit, and each of them has a slightly different relationship to the varnamala. Some places in the table are heavily used in one language and nearly empty in another; some sounds a modern language needs are absent from the table entirely and are written with a dot beneath the nearest letter; some letters that Sanskrit distinguishes are pronounced identically by most speakers of the modern languages, so that the script preserves distinctions that speech has merged. The three sibilants are the clearest case of that last pattern and the aspirated palatals are a case of the first.
None of this is a defect in the script. An alphabet that has been in continuous use for a millennium across a subcontinent will accumulate exactly these mismatches, and the alternative, redesigning the table for each language, would have cost the shared literacy that lets a reader of one of these languages sound out a text in another. This atlas records what is attested about each letter: its place in the classical table, its articulation as the grammarians described it, and where relevant the ways modern usage differs. It does not assert a symbolic or numerical value for any letter, because the Sanskrit tradition does not assign one.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Derived From
Devanagari Jha descends from the Brahmi sign of the same value, through the Gupta and Nagari hands of northern India. The two alphabets align letter for letter because both are laid out in the varnamala order, the arrangement the Sanskrit phoneticians fixed by place of articulation.
Related To
Devanagari Jha and the Gurmukhi letter Jhajja occupy the same slot of the varnamala, but the correspondence is historical rather than current. In most modern Punjabi the Gurmukhi letter no longer writes the voiced aspirate; it marks tone on the syllable instead, a development the Devanagari letter has no part in.
Jhajja and the Devanagari letter Jha occupy the same slot of the varnamala, but the correspondence is historical rather than current. In most modern Punjabi the Gurmukhi letter no longer writes the voiced aspirate; it marks tone on the syllable instead, a development the Devanagari letter has no part in.
Ranjana Jha and Devanagari Jha hold the same position in the inherited varnamala and write the same sound, as separate northern Brahmi descendants rather than as variants of one script. Devanagari is the relative most readers know, so the two charts can be read against each other.
The same letter of the same order in Devanagari. The two scripts are separate descendants of the same late Brahmi stock rather than one being taken from the other, which is why the sound value and the position agree while the shapes do not.
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