Dadda ਦ

Dadda is the twenty-third letter of the Gurmukhi painti and the third member of the dental series, a voiced d made with the tongue tip against the upper teeth. It stands to Tatta as Gagga stands to Kakka and Jajja to Chachcha, adding voice to a closure the row has already established, and with those two it completes the part of the dental series that a modern reader pronounces exactly as written. Punjabi holds it distinct from the retroflex d five letters earlier, and the two are never interchangeable. Dadda is one of the most frequent letters in the language and one of the most frequent in the vocabulary of the Guru Granth Sahib, standing at the head of a large family of words concerned with giving, with seeing and with the divine, and appearing constantly in the middle of words as well.

None of the six dotted extensions added to Gurmukhi for Perso-Arabic sounds falls on this letter, because the voiced dental stop was already common to the native and the borrowed vocabulary and needed no adaptation. On the page it is a stem with a bowl to the right and no additional stroke, which is what distinguishes it from the voiced aspirate that follows it in the series, and that single stroke is one of the differences a careless hand can lose.

Gurmukhi occupies a defined block in the international character standard, and every letter of the painti, every vowel sign, both nasal marks and the ten digits have a stable code point within it. That settlement is recent enough that its absence is still visible in the record. Before it, Punjabi text on computers was commonly produced with fonts that replaced the Latin letters of an ordinary keyboard layout with Gurmukhi shapes, so that a file contained Latin characters that only looked like Punjabi when the right font was applied. Such text cannot be searched, sorted or spell-checked as Punjabi, and it becomes unreadable the moment the font is lost, which is a real archival problem for material produced during that period.

A great deal of Punjabi publishing, including religious material, exists in that form. Migrating it requires knowing which font was used, because the mappings were not standardised and different founders made different choices. The lesson generalises beyond Punjabi and beyond Gurmukhi: a script is not properly encoded until its characters are what the file contains rather than what a particular rendering makes visible. Letters like Dadda, common enough to appear in almost any sentence, are the ones by which a converted file is most easily checked, since an error in the mapping shows up immediately rather than in some rare word.