Sassa in the Scribal Tradition

Sassa is the letter on which the question of the extended Gurmukhi set is usually argued, because the sh it can be made to write is the commonest of the sounds the painti does not natively record. The Guru Granth Sahib draws on a wide devotional vocabulary, including a great deal of Sanskritic material and a substantial Perso-Arabic layer, and in the older orthography words that carry an sh in their source language are written with plain Sassa, since the script as the Gurus used it made no distinction.

The dotted forms belong to a later stage, introduced as Gurmukhi took on the work of a general purpose modern script for Punjabi in print and in schooling. That leaves a standing tension, which the tradition resolves in favour of the text: the scripture is not respelled to match the modern set, because its wording is not open to editorial revision, and readers learn instead that a plain Sassa in the scripture may stand for a sound they would today write with the dot. The result is that Sassa carries two orthographies at once, one for the scripture and one for the newspaper, and a Gurmukhi reader moves between them without difficulty. The two systems also differ in scope. A dotted letter can be written for any word in modern Punjabi, but the older orthography of the scripture is closed: it applies to one fixed text and cannot be extended to new vocabulary, which is why nobody treats it as a competing standard for everyday writing.