Ddha: Retroflexion and Breathy Voice Together

Ddha is the fourteenth consonant of the varnamala, the voiced aspirated retroflex and the fourth member of the third varga. It combines the two features that make the Sanskrit stop system unusual among the world's languages, retroflexion and breathy voicing, in a single sound, and it is accordingly among the harder letters for a learner from outside the region to produce accurately. Like its unaspirated partner it takes a dotted variant in the modern languages for a flapped sound that classical Sanskrit did not distinguish. Its position in the table follows the standard pattern, fourth in the class and immediately before the nasal, and that regularity is what allows the grammatical literature to refer to the twenty-five stops by class and position rather than by name. It is worth restating what the pattern buys.

Two features, voicing and aspiration, generate four stops at each of five places of articulation, and each class is completed by the nasal made at the same place. Everything in the consonant table follows from that, so a letter is fully specified by three facts, and those three facts are what this atlas records for each one. Where a letter has something further that is genuinely attested, a word history or a rule that produces it, that is recorded too. Where it does not, nothing is invented to fill the space.