Devanagari Ddha ढ

Ddha is the fourteenth consonant of the varnamala, the voiced aspirated retroflex and the fourth member of the third varga. It combines the two features that make the Sanskrit stop system unusual among the world's languages, retroflexion and breathy voicing, in a single sound, and it is accordingly among the harder letters for a learner from outside the region to produce accurately. Like its unaspirated partner it takes a dotted variant in the modern languages for a flapped sound that classical Sanskrit did not distinguish. Its position in the table follows the standard pattern, fourth in the class and immediately before the nasal, and that regularity is what allows the grammatical literature to refer to the twenty-five stops by class and position rather than by name. It is worth restating what the pattern buys.

Two features, voicing and aspiration, generate four stops at each of five places of articulation, and each class is completed by the nasal made at the same place. Everything in the consonant table follows from that, so a letter is fully specified by three facts, and those three facts are what this atlas records for each one. Where a letter has something further that is genuinely attested, a word history or a rule that produces it, that is recorded too. Where it does not, nothing is invented to fill the space.

Because every letter of the four stop classes covered in this account is described by its coordinates, it is worth setting the coordinate system out in one place. Sanskrit closes the vocal tract at five points, and the grammarians named each after the part of the mouth involved: the soft palate, the hard palate, the crown of the mouth behind the teeth ridge, the teeth themselves, and the lips. Those five names give the five vargas their order, running from back to front.

Within each class the four stops are generated by two independent yes-or-no features, whether the vocal folds vibrate during the closure and whether breath is released after it, and the nasal made at the same place closes the class. The scheme accounts for twenty-five of the thirty-three Sanskrit consonants exactly, with no leftovers and no letters that fail to fit. The four semivowels and the three sibilants with h follow it in the table and are described by different criteria, but the stops are wholly regular. Recognising a modern articulatory phonetics chart in that description is not an anachronism; it is the reason the Indian phonetic tradition is treated in the history of linguistics as an independent and very early achievement, and it is the reason the varnamala is a different kind of object from the alphabets of the Mediterranean world.