Tatta, the Gurmukhi Digits and the Absence of Letter Numbers

Gurmukhi has its own set of ten digits, encoded and used alongside the letters, and their existence settles a question that readers arriving from the Hebrew or Greek alphabets often ask. In those scripts the letters double as numerals, so that each letter carries a numeric value and a whole interpretive tradition can be built on adding those values up.

Gurmukhi does nothing of the kind. Numbers are written with number signs, letters are written with letters, and no letter of the painti has an assigned numerical value in any Sikh source. The atlas states this positively rather than leaving the field blank, because an empty column invites a reader to assume the value has merely not been recorded yet, and because the temptation to import gematria into a script that has no equivalent is a real one. What Gurmukhi does count is pages.

Printed editions of the Guru Granth Sahib follow a standard pagination in which every copy carries the same text on the same page, so that a passage can be cited by page number and found in any volume anywhere. That fixed pagination is one of the more remarkable features of the Sikh scriptural tradition and it is a form of numeration built on the book rather than on the alphabet. Tatta appears on a very large number of those pages, and on none of them does it stand for a number.