Siddham Gha 𑖑

Gha is a voiced aspirate, breathy voiced, and it fills the fourth slot of the velar class. Every one of the five classes has such a letter, and the four features that define the grid, voicing and aspiration in their four combinations, are complete once it is in place. The fifth slot of each class is the nasal, which is a different kind of sound and closes the group.

To an ear trained on a language without the series, the difference between this letter and the plain voiced stop is very slight. To Sanskrit it is the difference between one word and another, and the language keeps the distinction rigorously. Siddham gives the sound a character of its own rather than writing it as the voiced stop with an added mark, which keeps the fourfold structure of each class legible at a glance and is one reason the Indic tables were copied rather than adapted when they reached East Asia.

In frequency the letter is modest. Its main occurrences are in a limited set of roots and in the words derived from them, and a page may go by without it. What it contributes is structural: it is the letter that makes each class a complete crossing of two features rather than a partial one.

The letter also illustrates something about how the table was received. A tradition copying a syllabary for liturgical use had no obvious reason to keep a sound its own speakers could not produce, and Japanese has nothing resembling a voiced aspirate. It was kept anyway, with a settled Japanese reading attached, because what was being transmitted was the table and not a working alphabet.

The four voiced aspirates in the letter table are one of the strongest pieces of evidence in comparative Indo-European linguistics, and they are there because Sanskrit preserved a set of sounds that almost every related language lost. Greek turned them into voiceless aspirates and then into fricatives. Latin turned them into fricatives at the front of a word and voiced stops elsewhere. Germanic and Slavic merged them with the plain voiced series. Sanskrit kept them distinct, wrote them with letters of their own, and had a grammatical tradition that described them precisely.

That preservation is a large part of why the discovery of Sanskrit by European scholars in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries reorganised the study of language. A language that keeps distinctions its relatives have merged shows what the merged forms came from, and the letter table, being an inventory of the sound system rather than a spelling convention, made the evidence unusually easy to read.

None of that is why the letter is in the Siddham order. The Indian phoneticians classified the sound because it existed in the language they were describing, centuries before anyone had a notion of a language family. But it is why a table compiled for one purpose turned out to be a document of another, and why a script preserved by Japanese monks for liturgical reasons has a place in the history of a European science.