Thattha and the Standardisation of Punjabi Spelling

Gurmukhi spent most of its history as a script with an authoritative text and no authoritative spelling for anything else. The Guru Granth Sahib fixed the orthography of its own language completely, and that orthography was never revised because the volume is treated as a living Guru whose wording is not open to editorial change.

Everything outside the scripture was another matter. Punjabi written for correspondence, accounts, poetry and pamphlets followed the scriptural model loosely and local practice otherwise, and the same word could be spelled several ways without anyone considering it an error. Standardisation of modern Punjabi orthography came much later, through schooling, publishing and the work of Punjabi language institutions, and it had to settle questions the scripture did not answer because the vocabulary had not yet existed. The dotted extensions are the visible part of that process. Thattha sits on the quiet side of it: the dental aspirate needed no new sign, appears in the scripture and in the newspaper alike, and is spelled the same way in both. Letters like this one are the reason standardisation was possible at all, since the great majority of the alphabet needed no decision and the argument could be confined to a small number of genuinely open cases.