Ṭainka: The Gurmukhi Letter

Ṭainka is the sixteenth letter of the Gurmukhi painti and opens the retroflex series, the third of the five and the middle of the journey from the back of the mouth to the lips. Retroflex consonants are made with the tip of the tongue curled back to meet the roof of the mouth just behind the teeth ridge, and they are among the defining sounds of the languages of South Asia. No European alphabet has letters for them, which is why romanisation has to add a dot beneath a t or a d to write them at all, and why the atlas gives this letter and its neighbours diacritics in their display names.

Ṭainka writes an unaspirated voiceless retroflex t, which Punjabi distinguishes sharply from the dental t written six letters further on. The letter is also the one clear irregularity in the naming of the painti. Most Gurmukhi letter names are built by doubling the letter's own syllable, giving Kakka, Gagga, Jajja and the rest, but this letter is called Ṭainka, and the departure from the pattern is a small piece of evidence about the way the names settled. Retroflexion is also a piece of evidence in the long argument about how the languages of South Asia influenced one another, since it is shared across the Indo-Aryan and Dravidian families despite those families being unrelated, and is usually explained as a feature that spread by contact. A Gurmukhi reader has no need of that history, but it is the reason the letters exist: the Brahmic alphabets were built for languages that had these sounds, and every script in the family carries a retroflex row.