Haha: The Gurmukhi Letter

Haha is the fifth letter of the Gurmukhi painti and the second of the two consonants placed ahead of the five ordered series. Written plainly it is an h. What makes it one of the most interesting letters in the script is that in Punjabi it is also a carrier of tone. Punjabi is unusual among the Indo-Aryan languages in having developed lexical tone, and the letters implicated in that development are Haha and the four voiced aspirates of the consonant series. In a large class of words the h is weakened or lost in speech and the pitch of the neighbouring vowel changes instead, so that the letter on the page records a consonant while the mouth produces a tone. Haha is also one of only three letters in the script with a reduced subjoined form, written beneath the consonant it follows rather than beside it.

The older orthography of the Guru Granth Sahib uses that subjoined form freely, where modern Punjabi print generally writes the full letter, so the shape is one of the visible differences between a scriptural page and an ordinary one. Tone is the feature that most surprises readers who come to Punjabi from the other Indo-Aryan languages, none of which has it in the same way, and Haha is one of the two written sources of it. The other is the set of voiced aspirates. Between them, those letters account for the whole of the tonal system without any mark of their own, which is an unusually economical piece of orthographic engineering, though an accidental one.