Dadda: The Gurmukhi Letter

Dadda is the twenty-third letter of the Gurmukhi painti and the third member of the dental series, a voiced d made with the tongue tip against the upper teeth. It stands to Tatta as Gagga stands to Kakka and Jajja to Chachcha, adding voice to a closure the row has already established, and with those two it completes the part of the dental series that a modern reader pronounces exactly as written. Punjabi holds it distinct from the retroflex d five letters earlier, and the two are never interchangeable. Dadda is one of the most frequent letters in the language and one of the most frequent in the vocabulary of the Guru Granth Sahib, standing at the head of a large family of words concerned with giving, with seeing and with the divine, and appearing constantly in the middle of words as well.

None of the six dotted extensions added to Gurmukhi for Perso-Arabic sounds falls on this letter, because the voiced dental stop was already common to the native and the borrowed vocabulary and needed no adaptation. On the page it is a stem with a bowl to the right and no additional stroke, which is what distinguishes it from the voiced aspirate that follows it in the series, and that single stroke is one of the differences a careless hand can lose.