Cha: The Same Step, One Place Further Forward

Cha is the seventh consonant of the varnamala, the voiceless aspirated palatal and the second member of the second varga. It repeats at the hard palate the step that kha makes at the soft palate, and the parallel is exact, because every varga passes through the same five slots in the same order. Knowing the pattern once means knowing the coordinates of any of the twenty-five stops from its position alone, and the whole grammatical tradition is built on that being reliable. The aspiration is a full distinction between letters, as it is throughout the table, and a Sanskrit word can differ from another only in whether this letter or its unaspirated partner appears in it.

In practice the letter is less common in Sanskrit than the other members of its class, and a good deal of its frequency in the modern languages written with Devanagari comes from vocabulary those languages developed after the classical period. That divergence between classical and modern frequency runs through several letters of the table and is worth holding in mind when reading a Hindi page and a Sanskrit page side by side: the same signs are in use, but they are not used at the same rates. A Sanskrit dictionary is alphabetised in the order of the varnamala, so this letter is looked up between the unaspirated palatal before it and the voiced palatal after it. A reader trained on the Latin alphabet, hunting for a word by the shape of its English spelling, will not find it. That is the first practical consequence of an alphabet ordered by articulation rather than by inheritance.