Alphabet Letters
Devanagari Ttha ठ
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
Ttha is the twelfth consonant of the varnamala, the voiceless aspirated retroflex and the second member of the third varga. Its place is fixed by the same five-step pattern that governs every class, and its articulation differs from the retroflex before it only by the release of breath that follows. The retroflex series is comparatively thin in inherited Sanskrit vocabulary and much better filled in the modern Indo-Aryan languages, so a page of Hindi shows these letters far more often than a page of classical Sanskrit does. In classical Sanskrit many retroflexes arise not from the root vocabulary but from rules that convert a dental into a retroflex in the neighbourhood of certain other sounds.
Facts
Disputed
Origin PeriodWhere the retroflex series came from is unsettled: one camp derives it from contact with Dravidian, the other from sound change internal to Indo-Aryan 1Tradition: Historical linguistics of South Asia The World's Writing Systems, edited by Peter T. Daniels and William Bright with contributions from specialists in Indo-Aryan and Dravidian historical linguistics, Oxford University Press, 1996, sets out two competing accounts of how Sanskrit's retroflex consonants arose, camps that remain both currently held. The contact account points to retroflexion attested across unrelated South Asian language families and to its presence in Dravidian from the earliest reconstructable stage, treating language contact as the cause. The internal account instead derives most Sanskrit retroflexes by regular sound-change rules from earlier consonant clusters, with no appeal to contact at all, and some scholars argue for a combination of internal development reinforced by contact. The volume's comparative historical linguistic method cannot produce decisive evidence either way because the relevant contact period is prehistoric for both families and the Indus script, which might otherwise bear on the question, remains undeciphered. This atlas names the camps and does not choose between them. Attributions
Associated SoundVoiceless aspirated retroflex stop 2Tradition: Sanskrit phonetics of the grammarians 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 aspirated retroflex, the second step of the retroflex varga's pattern. 2 Identity
Script TypeConsonant sign of a Brahmi-derived abugida; it carries the inherent short a unless a dependent vowel sign is written 1 PositionTwelfth consonant of the varnamala, second member of the retroflex class 1Tradition: 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
Ttha: The Second Retroflex
Ttha is the twelfth consonant of the varnamala, the voiceless aspirated retroflex and the second member of the third varga. Its place is fixed by the same five-step pattern that governs every class, and it differs from the retroflex before it only by the release of breath that follows the closure. Its usual romanisation, a t with a dot beneath followed by an h, is a compound notation representing two independent features, retroflexion and aspiration, and the scholarly transliteration systems are built around exactly that principle: each feature gets a mark, so that a reader can reconstruct the Devanagari letter from the Latin one without ambiguity.
Systems that instead spell Sanskrit sounds with the nearest English letter pairs lose the distinction and are the reason the same word turns up spelled several ways in popular writing. The retroflex series is comparatively thin in inherited Sanskrit vocabulary and much better filled in the modern Indo-Aryan languages, so a page of Hindi shows these letters far more often than a page of classical Sanskrit does. That difference in frequency between the classical and the modern use of one part of the table runs through several letters and is worth holding in view.
Retroflexion in the Table and in the Rules
The retroflex class occupies a full row of the varnamala, five letters like every other class, and the completeness is the point: having established that retroflexion is one of the five places at which Sanskrit makes a closure, the grammarians recorded all four stop combinations and the nasal at that place, whether or not the inherited vocabulary filled every one. The result is a table in which the retroflex row is structurally identical to the velar and dental rows even though the language uses those rows much more heavily. Beside the inherited retroflexes there are the derived ones.
A dental sibilant or nasal is converted to its retroflex counterpart when certain retroflex or r-like sounds occur earlier in the same word, and the conditions are stated in the grammar with a precision that has attracted a great deal of modern attention because the rules interact in intricate ways. A reader of a Sanskrit text therefore meets retroflexes at places where the underlying form had a dental, and undoing the change is part of the analysis a student is trained to perform. This atlas records the letter's place, its articulation and its behaviour, and does not assign it a numerical or symbolic value, because Sanskrit does not assign individual letters such values.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Derived From
Devanagari Ttha 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 Ttha and Devanagari Ttha 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 Ttha and the Gurmukhi letter Ṭhaṭṭha 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.
Ttha (retroflex) and the Devanagari letter Ttha 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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