Kha: Aspiration as a Distinction Between Letters

Kha is the second consonant of the varnamala, the voiceless aspirated velar and the second member of the first varga. What distinguishes it from ka is aspiration, a release of breath following the opening of the closure, and in Sanskrit that difference is not a variation within one sound but a difference between two sounds that distinguish different words. English has aspirated and unaspirated stops too, but distributes them automatically by position and does not use the difference to tell words apart, which is why an English speaker has to learn to hear it.

Every one of the five vargas is built to record the distinction. Each runs through the same five slots in the same order: voiceless unaspirated, voiceless aspirated, voiced unaspirated, voiced aspirated, and then the nasal made at the same place. The pattern repeats without exception across all five classes, which means that twenty-five of the thirty-three consonants of Sanskrit are fixed by two coordinates, the place of articulation and the position within the class. That regularity is the single most striking feature of the table and the thing that most separates it from the alphabets of the Mediterranean world, whose order preserves an inherited sequence and carries no information about how the sounds are made.