Thattha: The Gurmukhi Letter

Thattha is the twenty-second letter of the Gurmukhi painti and the second member of the dental series, the aspirated partner of Tatta. It writes a dental t released with a puff of breath. It is emphatically not the th of English thin or this, which are fricatives made by holding the tongue against the teeth rather than by releasing a closure, and which Punjabi does not have at all. This is the letter whose standard romanisation misleads most reliably, since a reader who applies English values to the two letters t and h together will produce a sound that appears nowhere in the language. The confusion is worth naming because it runs in both directions: Punjabi speakers learning English commonly substitute an aspirated dental stop for the English fricative, which is the same mismatch seen from the other side.

Within Punjabi the aspiration is contrastive and the letter is fully alive, having kept its breath where the voiced aspirates lost theirs. In transliteration it needs no dot, and that is exactly the problem the atlas has to solve in its display names: without a dot beneath the retroflex aspirate five letters earlier, the two letters would carry the same romanised name and a reader would have no way to tell which was meant. The dot is therefore not ornament but the whole of the distinction.