Tha: The Letter Its Romanisation Misrepresents

Tha is the seventeenth consonant of the varnamala, the voiceless aspirated dental and the second member of the fourth varga. Its usual romanisation is a standing source of confusion in English, because the two letters used to write it spell, in English words, a single fricative sound that Sanskrit does not possess at all. The Sanskrit letter is a dental t with breath released after it, and it is neither the th of think nor the th of this. That mismatch is a property of the romanisation rather than of the script, and it is one of the reasons the scholarly transliteration systems mark aspiration and retroflexion with explicit diacritics rather than trusting a reader to interpret pairs of Latin letters correctly. The practical consequence shows up throughout English writing about the Indian traditions, where words containing this letter are routinely pronounced by English speakers in a way that has no relation to the Sanskrit sound. The atlas transliterates letter names in a consistent scheme and states the articulation in words alongside it, so that a reader who does not know the conventions is not left to guess from the spelling.

Devanagari itself carries no such ambiguity. Each of the two features the letter combines has its own consequence in the table, there is exactly one sign for the sound, and a reader of the script is never in doubt about which letter is meant. The ambiguity is created entirely by writing an Indian language in a Latin alphabet that has no places for the features the varnamala is built on.