Siddham Ta 𑖝

Ta heads the dental class, the fourth of the five, and it is made with the tip of the tongue against the back of the upper teeth rather than on the ridge behind them where an English t is made. The difference is small in description and audible in practice, and to a Sanskrit ear the two are not variants of one sound.

The dental class stands to the retroflex class as a matched pair, and the language distinguishes words by nothing more than which of the two a letter belongs to. That is the requirement any script for Sanskrit has to meet, and Siddham meets it by keeping the two series wholly separate, five letters against five, with no shared shapes and no derivation of one from the other.

The letter is among the most frequent consonants in the language. It stands in a large number of common roots, in several very frequent grammatical endings, and in the past participle formation that is one of the most used constructions in Sanskrit prose, so a scribe writes it constantly.

It enters conjuncts more freely than most letters, and several of those combinations are common enough to have acquired distinctive shapes that a learner takes in as units rather than deriving from their parts.

Its frequency makes it a letter worth watching in any modern reproduction. Where a rendering of Siddham has been made by somebody copying shapes rather than writing the script, the common letters are usually the ones that look right and the rare ones the ones that do not, because the copyist has seen the common ones often enough to have absorbed them.

A Japanese monk reading a Siddham syllable does not pronounce it as a Sanskrit speaker would, and the tradition has never pretended otherwise. Japanese has no retroflex series, no voiced aspirates, no distinction between the three sibilants and no vocalic liquids, so a large part of the inventory the table sets out cannot be produced by a speaker trained only on Japanese sounds.

What developed instead is a set of reading conventions: an established Japanese pronunciation for each syllable, transmitted with the letters, which maps the Sanskrit inventory onto sounds a Japanese speaker can make. Distinctions that cannot be carried are merged, and the merger is systematic rather than accidental, so a syllable has a settled reading that a student learns along with its shape.

This is not a failure of the transmission and is not treated as one. The letters preserve the distinctions exactly, on the page, whether or not any given reader can voice them, which means the written record remains recoverable even where the spoken one has flattened. A scholar working from a Japanese Siddham manuscript reads the Sanskrit inventory from the letters and the Japanese reading tradition from the annotations, and the two are separate pieces of evidence about separate things.

The same arrangement holds for Sanskrit read anywhere outside India, and for Latin read anywhere in medieval Europe.