Phappha and the Six Dotted Letters

The six extensions Gurmukhi added outside the painti are all built the same way: an existing letter with a dot written beneath it, standing for a sound the native vocabulary did not hold but the borrowed vocabulary did. Five of them cover fricatives and sibilants, sounds Persian and Arabic have in abundance and Punjabi has sparsely, and the sixth is a lateral.

None of them is a stop, because the borrowed stops could all be accommodated by letters already in the alphabet. The method is worth noticing because it is the cheapest possible way to extend a script. No new shapes had to be designed, no new positions had to be found in the order, and a reader who knows the painti can read the extended letters at sight by reading the base and remembering that the dot shifts it. The cost is that the method depends on there being a near neighbour to borrow from, which is why the extensions cluster where they do rather than being spread across the alphabet. The Guru Granth Sahib contains none of them, since they postdate it, and its Perso-Arabic vocabulary is written with the plain letters throughout. Phappha is therefore one of the places where a reader sees most clearly that the scripture and the newspaper are spelled by two different systems.