Ṭhaṭṭha and the Adaptation of Borrowed Sounds

When a language borrows a word, it has to find native sounds for foreign ones, and the retroflex series is where Punjabi has historically done a great deal of that work. English coronal consonants, made with the tongue at the teeth ridge rather than against the teeth, are heard by Punjabi speakers as closer to the retroflex series than to the dental one, and English borrowings into Punjabi are therefore commonly written with retroflex letters where an English speaker would expect a plain t or d. The same is not true of Perso-Arabic borrowings, which arrived through a different route and were adapted differently. That is why the six dotted extensions Gurmukhi added for Persian and Arabic sounds are all fricatives and sibilants and none of them is a stop: the borrowed stops could be accommodated by letters the painti already had, and only the sounds with no native counterpart at all needed new signs.

Ṭhaṭṭha and its series are thus a working part of the modern language rather than an inherited formality, and the retroflex letters are among the most frequently used in contemporary Punjabi print. The pattern also runs the other way. Punjabi words entering English are commonly written with a plain t or d, since English has no way to write the distinction, and the retroflex quality is simply lost. That asymmetry is a familiar feature of borrowing between languages whose sound systems differ in what they treat as significant.