Jha: A Letter Sanskrit Barely Used and Hindi Does

Jha is the ninth consonant of the varnamala, the voiced aspirated palatal and the fourth member of the second varga. It is uncommon in Sanskrit, occurring in few inherited words, and the grammars note its rarity. In the modern languages written with Devanagari it is a different matter: it appears in ordinary Hindi and Marathi vocabulary and in a number of common surnames, and a speaker of those languages uses it without thinking of it as unusual. That gap between the classical and the modern frequency of a single letter is worth noticing, because it says something about what the varnamala is and what happened to it.

The table was fixed as an analysis of the sounds of Sanskrit. When later languages adopted the script they inherited the whole table, including places that Sanskrit filled thinly, and they filled those places at their own rates from their own vocabulary. The table did not change to match, because its authority came from being the classical arrangement rather than from being a census of any particular language's usage. What the modern languages did add, where they needed sounds the table had no place for, they added as marked variants of existing letters rather than as new positions.