Ha: The Last Letter of the Varnamala

Ha is the thirty-third and last consonant of the varnamala. It is a voiced breath, and the grammarians grouped it with the three sibilants in the ushman class, the sounds made with continuous air rather than with a closure, even though it is not a sibilant itself. Its place at the end of the table is not an afterthought: the stops have been laid out by their five places of articulation, the semivowels by the vowels they answer to, and the sibilants by their three places, and what remains is the one sound made with the vocal folds themselves rather than anywhere in the mouth. It is therefore the natural close of a table ordered from the back of the vocal tract forwards.

In conjuncts the letter combines with the semivowels and nasals in forms that are among the more distinctive in the script, and it takes a subscript form beneath certain letters that a learner has to recognise separately. Like every other letter in this alphabet it carries the inherent short a and is named by its own sound, with no inherited word name of the kind Greek and Hebrew letters carry. Sanskrit treats the letter as voiced, which distinguishes it from the breath written by the visarga, and the two are not variants of one another. One is a letter of the varnamala with a settled place in the ushman class; the other is a mark standing for a voiceless breath produced by rule at the end of a word. Charts that set them side by side as a pair of h sounds obscure a difference the tradition is careful about.