Pappa: The Gurmukhi Letter

Pappa is the twenty-sixth letter of the Gurmukhi painti and opens the labial series, the fifth and last of the ordered rows. The journey the alphabet makes through the mouth ends here, at the lips, having begun at the back of the throat with Kakka and passed through the palate, the roof of the mouth and the teeth. Pappa writes an unaspirated voiceless p, and its position in the grid tells a learner everything about it before they have heard it. With the labial row the system completes itself: five points of articulation, each with the same five manners of release, twenty-five letters in all, after which the painti adds the remaining sonorants and semivowels to reach the thirty-five that give it its name.

Pappa is a frequent letter in Punjabi and its written form is among the more distinctive in the alphabet, a stem from the headline with a closed bowl to its left, sharing less of its outline with its neighbours than the letters of the two t-rows share with theirs. That makes it one of the easier letters to read in a poor hand and one of the less likely to be misidentified in a damaged manuscript. The completion of the five series at the labials is also the point at which the ordering has said everything it can say about place of articulation, and the remaining letters of the painti are grouped by a different principle. What follows Pappa and its row are the sonorants and semivowels, sounds that do not involve a closure at all, and their place at the end of the alphabet reflects that they fall outside the grid rather than at any particular point within it.