Gagga: The Gurmukhi Letter

Gagga is the eighth letter of the Gurmukhi painti and the third member of the velar series, the voiced unaspirated g. With Kakka and Khakkha it completes the part of the velar group that a reader hears exactly as it is written, since the two letters that follow behave less straightforwardly in modern Punjabi. Voicing is the feature at issue: Kakka and Khakkha are made with the vocal folds still, Gagga with them vibrating, and the three together give Punjabi a clean three way distinction at the back of the mouth. Its written form is a stem from the headline with a short bar to its left, close enough to Kakka on the page that keeping the two apart is one of the recognised tests of a practised Gurmukhi hand.

In the extended set outside the painti, Gagga with a dot beneath writes the sound Persian and Urdu spell with ghain, a soft back fricative that Punjabi acquired through loanwords. As with the other dotted forms, that letter is a later addition, is not one of the thirty-five, and does not appear in the Guru Granth Sahib. The three way distinction at the back of the mouth is also what makes the velar row a useful teaching example. A learner who has grasped that Kakka, Khakkha and Gagga differ only in breath and voice can be shown the same three positions at the palate, at the roof of the mouth, at the teeth and at the lips, and has effectively learned twelve letters from three. The fourth and fifth members of each row are then taught as the two complications rather than as new material.