Ga: Where the Class Turns From Voiceless to Voiced

Ga is the third consonant of the varnamala, the voiced unaspirated velar and the third member of the first varga. With it the class turns from voiceless to voiced, the vocal folds vibrating during the closure rather than only after its release, and the structure of the varga becomes visible: the third and fourth members repeat the first and second with voicing added, and the fifth is the nasal made at the same place. Knowing that pattern once means knowing where any of the twenty-five stops sits from its name alone, and the grammatical literature relies on exactly that, referring to whole groups of sounds by class and position rather than by listing them.

The letter opens a large body of familiar vocabulary. The elephant-headed deity invoked at the beginning of undertakings, the river held sacred across northern India, and the Vedic metre and the verse recited in it all have names beginning with this sound, and all three are entries elsewhere in this atlas. That frequency is a fact about the lexicon rather than about the letter, but it is the reason the sign is among the first a learner recognises on a page. Its form descends through the Nagari and Siddhamatrika hands from a Brahmi letter of the same value.