Alphabet Letters
Devanagari Ta त
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
Ta is the sixteenth consonant of the varnamala and the head of the fourth varga, the dental class. Sanskrit dentals are true dentals, made with the tongue tip against the back of the upper teeth, and not the alveolar sounds an English speaker produces slightly further back; the difference is audible and is one of the first things a learner is corrected on. The dental class is heavily used, and the letter opens a large part of the core vocabulary. Its position in the table, fourth class of five, follows from the same forward progression that puts the velars first: the point of contact has moved from the soft palate to the teeth, and only the lips remain.
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 voiceless unaspirated dental, heading the fourth varga; a true dental made against the back of the upper teeth. 2 Identity
Script TypeConsonant sign of a Brahmi-derived abugida; it carries the inherent short a unless a dependent vowel sign is written 1 PositionSixteenth consonant of the varnamala and first member of the dental class, the fourth varga 1Tradition: Sanskrit phonetics of the grammarians Attributions
Associated SoundVoiceless unaspirated dental stop, made with the tongue tip at the back of the upper teeth, not on the ridge behind them as English t is 2Tradition: Sanskrit phonetics of the grammarians 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. Learn More
Ta: The Dental Class, and a Sound English Does Not Have
Ta is the sixteenth consonant of the varnamala and the head of the fourth varga, the dental class, made with the tongue tip against the back of the upper teeth. It is not the t of English, which is made further back on the ridge behind the teeth, and the difference is audible to a speaker of either language; it is one of the first things a learner of Sanskrit or Hindi is corrected on, and one of the features by which an Indian language speaker hears a foreign accent. The Sanskrit phoneticians named the class dantya, from the word for tooth, and placed it fourth because the point of closure has moved forward from the crown of the mouth to the teeth and only the lips remain.
The dental class is among the most heavily used in the language. It opens a very large part of the core vocabulary, including the pronouns and a great many common verbs and nouns, and it is involved in a large number of the sandhi rules that operate at word joins, since a word-final dental is extremely common and the changes it undergoes before a following consonant are correspondingly frequent. The class also supplies most of the word-final consonants in Sanskrit, because the endings of the noun and verb systems are built largely on dentals. The sandhi rules governing what a word-final dental becomes before the sound that starts the next word are correspondingly among the most frequently applied in the language, and a reader meets them in the first sentence of any text rather than as an advanced topic.
Dentals, Retroflexes and the Rules Between Them
The relationship between the dental class and the retroflex class immediately before it in the table is the busiest interaction in Sanskrit phonology. Two of the retroflex letters, the nasal and the sibilant, arise very largely by converting their dental counterparts in defined environments, and the conditions for those conversions are stated in the grammar in some of its most closely studied rules.
Beyond that, a dental stop assimilates to a neighbouring retroflex in a cluster, so the two classes trade places constantly in written forms. Because Sanskrit applies these changes in its writing rather than leaving them to the speaker, the text on the page shows the results, and reading a text back to the underlying words means undoing them. This is the practical reason a student learns the varnamala as a grid rather than as a sequence: the rules refer to classes and to positions, and a learner who does not have the grid in mind cannot follow a rule that says a dental becomes a retroflex under certain conditions. The alphabet and the grammar were designed together, and the order of the letters is part of the grammatical machinery rather than a convenience for indexing. That is the deepest difference between this alphabet and those of the Mediterranean world, where the sequence carries no information at all.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Derived From
Devanagari Ta 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
Ranjana Ta and Devanagari Ta 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.
Devanagari Ta and the Gurmukhi letter Tatta answer to the same sound and to the same slot of the varnamala. Gurmukhi descends from Sharada rather than from the Nagari line, so the agreement is inherited from a shared Brahmi ancestor rather than borrowed from Devanagari.
Tatta and the Devanagari letter Ta answer to the same sound and to the same slot of the varnamala. Gurmukhi descends from Sharada rather than from the Nagari line, so the agreement is inherited from a shared Brahmi ancestor rather than borrowed from Devanagari.
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