Ga in the Vocabulary of Going

One of the most productive roots in Sanskrit begins with this letter, the root meaning to go, and its derivatives run through the language. Used as the final member of a compound it forms adjectives meaning going in, moving through or situated in, so a great many descriptive terms in the religious and technical vocabulary of the subcontinent end in this consonant. The same root supplies the ordinary verb of motion, the noun for a going or a course, and a set of derived stems whose meanings have travelled a long way from movement.

In the writing the letter behaves as every consonant does. It carries the inherent short a, takes a vowel mark when a different vowel follows, and joins a following consonant into a single conjunct where no vowel comes between. Its clusters with the semivowels and with the class nasal are frequent, and in a script that stacks the second element of a cluster beneath the first, a common letter accumulates a large set of standard combined shapes that a reader learns as units rather than assembling each time. Several of the descendant scripts later added a subscript dot to this letter to write the voiced velar fricative of Persian and Arabic loanwords, one of a small family of dotted letters that extended the inherited inventory without disturbing its order.