Phappha: The Gurmukhi Letter

Phappha is the twenty-seventh letter of the Gurmukhi painti and the second member of the labial series, the aspirated partner of Pappa. It writes a p released with a puff of breath. It is not the f of English, despite the ph that romanisation gives it, and the same warning applies here as at the dental aspirate: a reader who takes the two letters at their English values produces a sound the plain letter does not write. Phappha is nonetheless the base of the letter that does write f. With a dot beneath it, in the extended set that lies outside the painti, it gives the labiodental fricative that Persian, Arabic and English words bring into Punjabi, and it is one of the six such extensions the script acquired.

What makes this letter more interesting than the other five is that the distinction has been eroding in speech. In much of modern Punjabi the plain aspirated letter is pronounced as an f by a large number of speakers, so the sound the dot was introduced to distinguish is now commonly produced for the undotted letter as well, and the dot is frequently omitted in ordinary writing without loss of comprehension. The convergence of the two sounds in speech is a live change rather than a settled one, and it varies by region and by register, so a description that reported either the older or the newer pronunciation as simply correct would be misleading. The atlas records the letter as an aspirated stop, which is what the painti assigns it, and records the shift separately as something happening now.