Alphabet Letters
Siddham Tha 𑖞
Siddham Letters
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Origin The Siddhamatrka hand from which Siddham takes its form grows out of the late Brahmi of the Gupta period and is current in Indian inscriptions and manuscripts from about the sixth century CE.
Tha is the second letter of the dental class of the Siddham syllabary, a voiceless aspirated dental stop. It is a t with breath released after it, and it is not the th of English think or this, neither of which Sanskrit has. Transliteration into the Latin alphabet using two letters has misled readers of Sanskrit for as long as the convention has existed, which is an argument for reading the script in its own characters. In Siddham the sound has a single letter and no ambiguity, and the aspiration belongs to the letter rather than to a mark added to another one. It stands second in its class by the same rule that puts the aspirate second in each of the other four, so its position can be predicted without knowing the word it appears in.
Facts
Origins
Origin PeriodThe Siddhamatrka hand from which Siddham takes its form grows out of the late Brahmi of the Gupta period and is current in Indian inscriptions and manuscripts from about the sixth century CE. 3Tradition: Indian epigraphy Place of OriginNorthern India 3Tradition: Indian epigraphy Origin of the NameNamed by its own sound. Siddham letter names are the sound itself, as in the other Brahmic syllabaries, rather than borrowed words as in the Greek and Semitic alphabets. 1Tradition: Sanskrit phonetics of the grammarians Sense of the Namethe aspirated voiceless dental stop; second of the dental class 4Tradition: The Siddham syllabary in its traditional order Identity
Script TypeConsonant sign of a Brahmi-derived abugida; it carries the inherent short a unless a dependent vowel sign is written 1 PositionThirty-first letter of the Siddham order, second of the dental class 1Tradition: Sanskrit phonetics of the grammarians Attributions
Associated SoundVoiceless aspirated dental stop; a t with breath released after it, not the th of English think or this 2Tradition: Sanskrit phonetics of the grammarians Attestation
Meaning in the Attesting SourcePreserved in East Asia after the script had ceased to be written in India, and studied in Japan as shittan, the discipline of Sanskrit letter study transmitted through Chinese Buddhist translation. 5Tradition: East Asian esoteric Buddhism Learn More
Tha: The Siddham Letter
Tha is the aspirated voiceless dental, a t with breath released after it, and it holds the second slot of the dental class. It is not the th of English think, and it is not the th of English this. Sanskrit has neither of those sounds, and the two-letter Latin spelling used for this letter has misled readers of Sanskrit for as long as the convention has existed.
In Siddham the sound has a single character and no ambiguity. Aspiration belongs to the letter rather than to a mark added to another letter, so nothing about the written form invites the reading that the Latin spelling invites. That is a small but real argument for reading an Indian language in an Indian script, and it is one the East Asian tradition arrived at from the other direction: it kept the Siddham original precisely because its own transcriptions could not carry these distinctions.
The letter is reasonably common in the vocabulary and appears in several frequent grammatical formations. It takes the full range of vowel marks, carries the inherent short a, and enters conjuncts, most often with the semivowel ra and with the sibilants.
Its position in the class is predictable from the rule that governs all five, which puts the aspirate second in every group.
Siddham and the Other Scripts of the Same Stock
Siddham is one branch of a very large family. The Brahmi of the Gupta period gave rise to a set of related hands across northern India, and from those descend Devanagari, the Nagari and Ranjana scripts of the Himalayan region, the Newa script of the Kathmandu valley, the Bengali and Oriya scripts, the Tibetan script and, further off, the scripts of Southeast Asia. Siddham is a sibling of these rather than an ancestor.
The family resemblance is easiest to see in structure rather than in shape. All of them are abugidas, all inherit the same order of letters, all write vowels as dependent marks, all stack their consonant clusters, and all treat the syllable as the written unit. A reader of one can usually work out how another is put together long before being able to read it.
The differences are largely a matter of when each branch left the common stock and what happened to it afterwards. Tibetan carries adaptations for a language with sounds Sanskrit does not have. Devanagari carries centuries of subsequent adjustment for the languages of northern India. Siddham carries almost nothing after its departure, because it left early and was preserved rather than used.
Reading them side by side is how the shared order becomes visible as an inheritance rather than a coincidence.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Belongs to Tradition
Shingon writes Sanskrit in Siddham and has done since the school was founded, keeping the script in use in Japan long after it had ceased to be written in India. The letters are studied as a set under the name shittan, and the contemplative practices attached to particular syllables are transmitted by initiation.
Tendai, the other Japanese school carrying an esoteric transmission, keeps the same letters in liturgical and inscriptional use. Siddham on a Japanese grave marker or a ritual implement may belong to either school, and the letters themselves are common to both.
Derived From
Siddham continues the Brahmi order letter for letter. The descent runs through the late Brahmi of the Gupta period and the Siddhamatrka hand that grows out of it, so this is a lineage rather than a direct copy of the older shape.
Originates in Language
The letter is named by its own Sanskrit sound and holds the place the Sanskrit phoneticians gave that sound in their analysis. Siddham was made to write this language, and the East Asian schools that preserved the script preserved it as a way of writing Sanskrit rather than adapting it to a local tongue.
Related To
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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