Ja: The Voiced Palatal

Ja is the eighth consonant of the varnamala, the voiced unaspirated palatal and the third member of the second varga, standing to ca exactly as ga stands to ka. It opens a number of terms central to the tradition's vocabulary of practice and knowledge, among them the word for the repetition of a name or formula and, in a conjunct with the palatal nasal, the word for knowledge in its higher sense. Both are carried untranslated into English writing about Indian religion and both have entries elsewhere in this atlas. The letter's written form is one of the more elaborate in the script, and it takes a dot beneath it in the modern languages to write a sound borrowed with Persian and Arabic vocabulary, one of several such dotted letters added to Devanagari after the classical period.

The dotted forms are a good illustration of how an alphabet designed as a closed phonetic analysis of one language accommodates others: rather than reordering the table, the script marks the new sounds as modifications of the nearest existing letters, so the varnamala's structure survives intact and the additions sit visibly outside it. Its position in the table is fully specified by three facts, palatal, voiced and unaspirated, and for a stop in the varnamala that is genuinely the whole of what the letter is. The word histories recorded elsewhere on these pages are facts about words that happen to begin with a given sound, and a reader should not read them back into the sign, which carries no meaning of its own.