Ṭhaṭṭha ਠ

Ṭhaṭṭha is the seventeenth letter of the Gurmukhi painti and the second member of the retroflex series, the aspirated counterpart of Ṭainka. Between this series and the dental series that follows it, Punjabi distinguishes four consonants where English has a single t: retroflex plain, retroflex aspirated, dental plain and dental aspirated, each with its own letter and each capable of distinguishing one word from another.

A reader whose first alphabet was European has to learn to hear a contrast their language does not make, while a Punjabi child acquires it without instruction. Ṭhaṭṭha keeps its aspiration in modern speech, as all the voiceless aspirates do. In romanisation the letter needs two marks at once, a dot beneath the t for retroflexion and a following h for aspiration, and without the dot its name collapses into the same string as the dental aspirate Thattha, which is the reason the atlas carries diacritics in the display names of this series rather than stripping them for convenience. The four way distinction is also a reason romanised Punjabi is unsatisfactory for anything careful. A romanisation without diacritics collapses the retroflex and dental rows into one another and loses eight letters into four, which is tolerable for a place name on a signpost and not tolerable for a dictionary, a grammar or a reference work. The atlas therefore carries the marks in the display names, at the cost of a slightly heavier line, rather than presenting two different letters under one label.

When a language borrows a word, it has to find native sounds for foreign ones, and the retroflex series is where Punjabi has historically done a great deal of that work. English coronal consonants, made with the tongue at the teeth ridge rather than against the teeth, are heard by Punjabi speakers as closer to the retroflex series than to the dental one, and English borrowings into Punjabi are therefore commonly written with retroflex letters where an English speaker would expect a plain t or d. The same is not true of Perso-Arabic borrowings, which arrived through a different route and were adapted differently. That is why the six dotted extensions Gurmukhi added for Persian and Arabic sounds are all fricatives and sibilants and none of them is a stop: the borrowed stops could be accommodated by letters the painti already had, and only the sounds with no native counterpart at all needed new signs.

Ṭhaṭṭha and its series are thus a working part of the modern language rather than an inherited formality, and the retroflex letters are among the most frequently used in contemporary Punjabi print. The pattern also runs the other way. Punjabi words entering English are commonly written with a plain t or d, since English has no way to write the distinction, and the retroflex quality is simply lost. That asymmetry is a familiar feature of borrowing between languages whose sound systems differ in what they treat as significant.