Da: The Voiced Dental

Da is the eighteenth consonant of the varnamala, the voiced unaspirated dental and the third member of the fourth varga. It is among the most frequent consonants in Sanskrit and in the modern languages that use the script, and it opens a wide range of ordinary and technical vocabulary. Its relation to the letters around it is the relation that holds in every varga: it is the dental of the class's first letter with voicing added, and the letter that follows it is itself with aspiration added. The consistency of that scheme across all five classes is what allows the grammatical tradition to refer to a sound by its coordinates in the table rather than by name, and it is what makes the twenty-five stops learnable as a system rather than as a list.

Like the other dentals it is a true dental, made with the tongue tip at the teeth rather than on the ridge behind them, and like them it participates heavily in the sandhi rules that operate at word joins. A word-final dental is common in Sanskrit and its treatment before a following sound is one of the first parts of the sandhi system a learner meets. It is also among the letters whose combining behaviour a learner meets earliest, because clusters of a dental with a following semivowel occur throughout ordinary Sanskrit vocabulary and appear on almost any page. Reading those compound signs fluently is the step between knowing the alphabet and reading the script, and it is a distinct stage of learning rather than a refinement of the first one.