The Sound Behind a Misleading Transliteration

The two-letter spelling used for this consonant in European scholarship has misled generations of readers. It is not the th of English think, and not the th of this either; neither of those sounds occurs in Sanskrit at all. It is a single dental stop released with a following breath, and the roman spelling is a convenience that happens to collide with an English digraph. The Brahmi letter makes no such promise, because it writes one sound with one sign and the question of how to spell it in another alphabet never arises.

In the language the letter does specific work. It is the ending of the second person plural of a large class of verbs, so a sentence addressed to several people carries it, and it appears in a set of common nominal suffixes besides. In the Prakrit of the Ashokan edicts it is frequent, because a family of inherited clusters simplified to an aspirated dental as the language moved into its Middle Indo-Aryan stage.

That change is one of the regular correspondences by which a Prakrit form and its Sanskrit counterpart are matched, and it works in both directions. An editor reading a damaged word in an edict can often say what the Sanskrit behind it must have been, and a reader who knows only Sanskrit can learn to convert as they read. The handbooks of Indian epigraphy teach exactly that skill, and it is why they devote as much room to Middle Indo-Aryan phonology as to the letters.