Chachcha: The Gurmukhi Letter

Chachcha is the eleventh letter of the Gurmukhi painti and the first of the palatal series, the chavarg. The five series of a Brahmic alphabet are arranged as a journey forward through the mouth, beginning at the back with the velars and ending at the lips, and the palatals are the second stage: made with the body of the tongue raised against the hard palate. Chachcha writes an unaspirated voiceless ch, the sound that opens the English word church, and within its series it holds the same first position that Kakka holds among the velars. It is a common initial in Punjabi and in the devotional vocabulary of the Guru Granth Sahib.

On the page it is a stem dropped from the headline with a small closed loop at its upper left, and the loop is where a learner has to be careful, because the aspirated partner that follows it in the series is distinguished by the treatment of that same feature. The ordering that puts Chachcha here is not Punjabi in origin but inherited, and it is one of the things that shows Gurmukhi to be a member of the Brahmic family however much its individual letterforms owe to the mercantile hands of the Punjab. The move from velar to palatal is also where a learner first feels the logic of the ordering rather than being told it, since the second row repeats the pattern of the first at a new point in the mouth and the prediction holds. From that point the remaining three rows are largely a matter of confirming what the learner already expects.