Babba: The Gurmukhi Letter

Babba is the twenty-eighth letter of the Gurmukhi painti and the third member of the labial series, a voiced unaspirated b made by closing and releasing the lips with the voice already running. It stands to Pappa exactly as Gagga stands to Kakka, Jajja to Chachcha, Ḍadda to Ṭainka and Dadda to Tatta, and by this point in the alphabet a learner is expecting it: the fifth and last repetition of a relationship the grid has established four times already. That predictability is the whole argument for the Brahmic ordering, and the labial row is where it pays off most obviously, since a learner arriving here can name the properties of every letter in the row before being shown a single shape.

Babba is frequent in Punjabi and in the vocabulary of the Guru Granth Sahib. It takes none of the six dotted extensions, because the voiced labial stop was already shared between the native word stock and the Persian and Arabic borrowings, so nothing had to be added for it. On the page it is a stem from the headline carrying a bowl to the left with a stroke crossing it, and it is distinguished from the voiced aspirate that follows by one further element, which is the kind of minimal difference that makes careful handwriting matter in this script.