Sassa: The Gurmukhi Letter

Sassa is the fourth letter of the Gurmukhi painti and the first consonant in it. Its place in the sequence is inherited rather than phonetic. Brahmic alphabets order their consonants by the point in the mouth at which each is made, running from the back of the throat forward to the lips, and then add the sonorants and sibilants after. Gurmukhi departs from that arrangement by setting Sassa and Haha ahead of the five ordered series instead of behind them, an ordering it shares with the Landa mercantile hands of the Punjab from which its sequence descends, and which distinguishes the painti at a glance from Devanagari or from the Brahmic orders used further east.

Sassa writes a plain s. It is written as a stem hung from the headline with a hook to its left and a short crossbar, and it is one of the highest frequency letters in Punjabi. In the extended set that lies outside the painti, Sassa with a dot written beneath it writes sh, a sound Punjabi does not natively distinguish but which is needed for words taken from Sanskrit and from Persian and Arabic. That dotted form is a later addition to the script and is not one of the thirty-five. The placement of Sassa and Haha at the front is worth stating carefully, because it is often described as an oddity. It is better read as evidence of descent: the mercantile hands the painti order comes from were shaped by what merchants needed to write, not by the phonological theory that ordered the Sanskrit alphabet.