Phappha ਫ

Phappha is the twenty-seventh letter of the Gurmukhi painti and the second member of the labial series, the aspirated partner of Pappa. It writes a p released with a puff of breath. It is not the f of English, despite the ph that romanisation gives it, and the same warning applies here as at the dental aspirate: a reader who takes the two letters at their English values produces a sound the plain letter does not write. Phappha is nonetheless the base of the letter that does write f. With a dot beneath it, in the extended set that lies outside the painti, it gives the labiodental fricative that Persian, Arabic and English words bring into Punjabi, and it is one of the six such extensions the script acquired.

What makes this letter more interesting than the other five is that the distinction has been eroding in speech. In much of modern Punjabi the plain aspirated letter is pronounced as an f by a large number of speakers, so the sound the dot was introduced to distinguish is now commonly produced for the undotted letter as well, and the dot is frequently omitted in ordinary writing without loss of comprehension. The convergence of the two sounds in speech is a live change rather than a settled one, and it varies by region and by register, so a description that reported either the older or the newer pronunciation as simply correct would be misleading. The atlas records the letter as an aspirated stop, which is what the painti assigns it, and records the shift separately as something happening now.

The six extensions Gurmukhi added outside the painti are all built the same way: an existing letter with a dot written beneath it, standing for a sound the native vocabulary did not hold but the borrowed vocabulary did. Five of them cover fricatives and sibilants, sounds Persian and Arabic have in abundance and Punjabi has sparsely, and the sixth is a lateral.

None of them is a stop, because the borrowed stops could all be accommodated by letters already in the alphabet. The method is worth noticing because it is the cheapest possible way to extend a script. No new shapes had to be designed, no new positions had to be found in the order, and a reader who knows the painti can read the extended letters at sight by reading the base and remembering that the dot shifts it. The cost is that the method depends on there being a near neighbour to borrow from, which is why the extensions cluster where they do rather than being spread across the alphabet. The Guru Granth Sahib contains none of them, since they postdate it, and its Perso-Arabic vocabulary is written with the plain letters throughout. Phappha is therefore one of the places where a reader sees most clearly that the scripture and the newspaper are spelled by two different systems.