Ca: The Palatal Class Opens

Ca is the sixth consonant of the varnamala and the head of the second varga, the palatal class. It is voiceless and unaspirated, made with the body of the tongue against the hard palate, and it is conventionally transliterated with a bare c although English speakers hear it as the ch of church. The palatal class stands second because the varnamala runs from the back of the mouth forwards: the velars are made furthest back, the palatals next, and everything else is made further forward still.

The Sanskrit phoneticians named the class talavya, from the word for palate. The class shares its place of articulation with the vowels i and long i, and that is not an incidental parallel. The grammarians classified vowels and consonants by the same criteria and used the correspondence in their rules, most visibly in the rule that turns i into the palatal semivowel ya when a dissimilar vowel follows. Sound changes in Sanskrit run along these class lines constantly, and a reader who knows which class a sound belongs to can predict a great deal of what happens to it at a word join. That predictive value is the practical payoff of arranging an alphabet by articulation instead of by inheritance. It is also among the letters most often mis-transliterated in popular writing, where the bare c of the scholarly systems is replaced by ch and the aspirated letter that follows it by chh, so that a reader meeting both spellings has no way to tell which of the two Devanagari letters is meant.