Ta: The Dental Class, and a Sound English Does Not Have

Ta is the sixteenth consonant of the varnamala and the head of the fourth varga, the dental class, made with the tongue tip against the back of the upper teeth. It is not the t of English, which is made further back on the ridge behind the teeth, and the difference is audible to a speaker of either language; it is one of the first things a learner of Sanskrit or Hindi is corrected on, and one of the features by which an Indian language speaker hears a foreign accent. The Sanskrit phoneticians named the class dantya, from the word for tooth, and placed it fourth because the point of closure has moved forward from the crown of the mouth to the teeth and only the lips remain.

The dental class is among the most heavily used in the language. It opens a very large part of the core vocabulary, including the pronouns and a great many common verbs and nouns, and it is involved in a large number of the sandhi rules that operate at word joins, since a word-final dental is extremely common and the changes it undergoes before a following consonant are correspondingly frequent. The class also supplies most of the word-final consonants in Sanskrit, because the endings of the noun and verb systems are built largely on dentals. The sandhi rules governing what a word-final dental becomes before the sound that starts the next word are correspondingly among the most frequently applied in the language, and a reader meets them in the first sentence of any text rather than as an advanced topic.