Ṭhaṭṭha: The Gurmukhi Letter

Ṭhaṭṭha is the seventeenth letter of the Gurmukhi painti and the second member of the retroflex series, the aspirated counterpart of Ṭainka. Between this series and the dental series that follows it, Punjabi distinguishes four consonants where English has a single t: retroflex plain, retroflex aspirated, dental plain and dental aspirated, each with its own letter and each capable of distinguishing one word from another.

A reader whose first alphabet was European has to learn to hear a contrast their language does not make, while a Punjabi child acquires it without instruction. Ṭhaṭṭha keeps its aspiration in modern speech, as all the voiceless aspirates do. In romanisation the letter needs two marks at once, a dot beneath the t for retroflexion and a following h for aspiration, and without the dot its name collapses into the same string as the dental aspirate Thattha, which is the reason the atlas carries diacritics in the display names of this series rather than stripping them for convenience. The four way distinction is also a reason romanised Punjabi is unsatisfactory for anything careful. A romanisation without diacritics collapses the retroflex and dental rows into one another and loses eight letters into four, which is tolerable for a place name on a signpost and not tolerable for a dictionary, a grammar or a reference work. The atlas therefore carries the marks in the display names, at the cost of a slightly heavier line, rather than presenting two different letters under one label.