Siddham Tta 𑖘

Tta heads the retroflex class, the third of the five, and it is made with the tip of the tongue curled back against the roof of the mouth. The Sanskrit phoneticians call the class murdhanya, which means formed at the top of the head, and the name is a description of where they located the closure rather than a metaphor.

Its place in the order follows the same rule as everything else in the consonant section. The classes run from the back of the mouth forwards, so the retroflex class stands between the palatal and the dental, and within the class this letter takes the first slot: voiceless, unaspirated, the plainest treatment of the sound.

In the vocabulary of classical Sanskrit the retroflex stops are noticeably less frequent than the dentals, and a large share of the words containing them are either borrowings, onomatopoeic, or produced by a rule from something else. That skew is one of the standing questions of Indo-Aryan linguistics, since the retroflex series has no counterpart in the languages Sanskrit is related to outside India and does have counterparts in the Dravidian languages spoken alongside it.

On the page the letter behaves ordinarily. It carries the inherent short a, takes the full range of vowel marks, and enters conjuncts freely, most often with the retroflex nasal and with the retroflex sibilant that belongs to the same articulation.

A writing system for Sanskrit has to separate the retroflex consonants from the dental ones, because the language does. Words differ by nothing else, and the difference reaches into the grammar: a rule converts a dental nasal to a retroflex one under stated conditions, and another does the same for the dental sibilant, so the two series are not merely two sets of sounds but two states that the same sound moves between.

Every Brahmic script accordingly carries both series in full, five letters each, and Siddham is no exception. That is one of the design requirements that distinguishes this family of scripts from the alphabets of the Mediterranean, which have one t and one d because the languages they were built for had no reason to want more.

The consequence for anyone reading Sanskrit outside its own script is severe. Latin transliteration marks the retroflex series with a dot under the letter, and where the dots are dropped, which outside specialist publishing they usually are, the two series collapse into one. Words that are distinct in the language become identical on the page, and a reader has no way of telling which was meant.

The atlas records the distinction on the letters themselves for exactly that reason. The plain spellings used for readability cannot carry it, and the letter pages are where it is kept.