Dda: The Ranjana Letter

Dda is the third cell of the retroflex row, the plain voiced retroflex, standing to Tta as Ga stands to Ka and Ja to Ca. The pattern is now familiar, which is exactly the effect the order was designed to produce: by the third row a learner is no longer learning a sequence but confirming one. What changes from row to row is only the point in the mouth at which the closure is made, and within a row only the state of the voice and the breath. Sanskrit uses this consonant widely, and it is one of the letters where the retroflex and dental rows produce pairs of words distinguished by nothing else, which is why the distinction cannot be treated as a fine detail of pronunciation.

In Ranjana the letter carries the inherent short a like every consonant sign, hangs from the head stroke, takes its vowel marks in the four available positions, and can be joined with a following consonant into a single stacked form when no vowel comes between them. The pairing with the dental row is also the reason the two are placed adjacently rather than separated. A learner has to meet the contrast directly to hear it, and an order that put them apart would have made the hardest distinction in the chart harder still.