Gagga ਗ

Gagga is the eighth letter of the Gurmukhi painti and the third member of the velar series, the voiced unaspirated g. With Kakka and Khakkha it completes the part of the velar group that a reader hears exactly as it is written, since the two letters that follow behave less straightforwardly in modern Punjabi. Voicing is the feature at issue: Kakka and Khakkha are made with the vocal folds still, Gagga with them vibrating, and the three together give Punjabi a clean three way distinction at the back of the mouth. Its written form is a stem from the headline with a short bar to its left, close enough to Kakka on the page that keeping the two apart is one of the recognised tests of a practised Gurmukhi hand.

In the extended set outside the painti, Gagga with a dot beneath writes the sound Persian and Urdu spell with ghain, a soft back fricative that Punjabi acquired through loanwords. As with the other dotted forms, that letter is a later addition, is not one of the thirty-five, and does not appear in the Guru Granth Sahib. The three way distinction at the back of the mouth is also what makes the velar row a useful teaching example. A learner who has grasped that Kakka, Khakkha and Gagga differ only in breath and voice can be shown the same three positions at the palate, at the roof of the mouth, at the teeth and at the lips, and has effectively learned twelve letters from three. The fourth and fifth members of each row are then taught as the two complications rather than as new material.

Gagga is the first letter of the word Gurmukhi itself, and of Guru, Granth and Gurdwara, which places it at the head of a great deal of Sikh writing and inscription. That frequency has a practical consequence for anyone reading manuscripts, because a letter that appears constantly is a letter whose hand is most easily characterised: palaeographers comparing Gurmukhi manuscripts look at high frequency forms first, since the way a particular scribe turns a common stroke is a steadier signal than the way the same scribe writes a rare one. The name of the script is itself the subject of the standing argument about its origin. Gurmukhi is read within the tradition as meaning from the mouth of the Guru, and Sikh reference works credit Guru Angad, the second Guru, with giving the script its settled form in the sixteenth century.

Historians of Indic writing hold that the letterforms were already in use in the mercantile Landa hands of the Punjab, descended through Sharada from the Brahmi line, and that what the Guru did was to order, name, fix and dignify an existing repertoire rather than to invent one. The atlas records both positions and settles neither. The disagreement is also worth stating in its mildest form, since neither side denies the other much. Nobody argues that the Gurus drew the letters from nothing, and nobody argues that the painti as an ordered, named, taught set existed before them; what is at issue is how much of the work was invention and how much was arrangement.