Pappa ਪ

Pappa is the twenty-sixth letter of the Gurmukhi painti and opens the labial series, the fifth and last of the ordered rows. The journey the alphabet makes through the mouth ends here, at the lips, having begun at the back of the throat with Kakka and passed through the palate, the roof of the mouth and the teeth. Pappa writes an unaspirated voiceless p, and its position in the grid tells a learner everything about it before they have heard it. With the labial row the system completes itself: five points of articulation, each with the same five manners of release, twenty-five letters in all, after which the painti adds the remaining sonorants and semivowels to reach the thirty-five that give it its name.

Pappa is a frequent letter in Punjabi and its written form is among the more distinctive in the alphabet, a stem from the headline with a closed bowl to its left, sharing less of its outline with its neighbours than the letters of the two t-rows share with theirs. That makes it one of the easier letters to read in a poor hand and one of the less likely to be misidentified in a damaged manuscript. The completion of the five series at the labials is also the point at which the ordering has said everything it can say about place of articulation, and the remaining letters of the painti are grouped by a different principle. What follows Pappa and its row are the sonorants and semivowels, sounds that do not involve a closure at all, and their place at the end of the alphabet reflects that they fall outside the grid rather than at any particular point within it.

Printed editions of the Guru Granth Sahib follow a standard pagination in which every copy carries the same text on the same numbered page, so that a passage can be cited by page and located in any volume in any gurdwara in the world. That uniformity is unusual among scriptures, most of which are cited by chapter and verse precisely because their pagination varies between editions, and it reflects the particular status the volume holds: Sikh practice treats it as a living Guru rather than as a book, and a book that is a Guru is not reset to suit a printer.

The consequence for anyone working with the text is a considerable convenience, since a reference is unambiguous without any apparatus, and the consequence for publishing is a constraint, since the page cannot be reflowed for a different format without losing the reference system. It also means that the physical proportions of the letters, including Pappa and every other, are effectively fixed within the standard edition, and that a typeface intended for it has to fit a predetermined amount of text into a predetermined space. Few writing systems have had a design brief of that kind imposed on them by the status of a single book. The standard pagination also shapes how the text is studied. Because a page number is a stable reference, Sikh commentary, translation and concordance work can all key to it, and a reader following a commentary can hold two volumes open at the same place without any negotiation between editions.