Dhaddha and the Comparison With Devanagari

Gurmukhi and Devanagari are both Brahmic scripts, both write from a headline, and both order their consonants into the same five series in the same sequence, so a reader of one can follow the structure of the other immediately. The differences are worth setting out, because they are often understated. Devanagari places its sibilants and sonorants after the five series, where Gurmukhi puts Sassa and Haha in front of them. Devanagari retains a large repertoire of conjunct forms, where Gurmukhi kept only three subjoined consonants and writes almost everything on a single level.

Devanagari distinguishes three sibilants, where Gurmukhi natively had one and added a dotted second. The letterforms themselves are not derived from one another; both descend from the Brahmi line but through different branches, Gurmukhi by way of Sharada and the Landa hands of the northwest, so the resemblance between an individual Gurmukhi letter and its Devanagari counterpart is sometimes strong and sometimes absent. Dhaddha and its Devanagari counterpart occupy the identical cell of the identical grid and look nothing alike. That combination, shared architecture and independent shapes, is the most accurate short description of how the two scripts stand to each other.