Devanagari Bha भ

Bha is the twenty-fourth consonant of the varnamala, the voiced aspirated labial and the fourth member of the fifth varga. It opens the word for devotional participation that names one of the major streams of Indian religious practice, and the title of the text in which Krishna instructs Arjuna on the field before the battle, both of which are carried untranslated into English and both of which have entries elsewhere in this atlas. As the fourth member of its class the letter carries breathy voicing, the feature Sanskrit preserved from its Indo-European ancestor where most of the related languages lost or transformed it, and its position immediately before the labial nasal completes the pattern that all five vargas follow. The words are facts about vocabulary rather than about the sign, and this atlas keeps the two apart deliberately.

A Devanagari letter is named by its own sound, so any Sanskrit word beginning with that sound shares the letter's name without lending it a meaning, and in a script with no inherited letter names of the Greek or Semitic kind there is no mechanism by which such a meaning could attach. Sanskrit has no letter for a labial fricative of either kind, so the labial class is exhausted by its four stops and its nasal. That absence is as much a part of the analysis as the presences are, and it is why the ushman class that closes the table holds three sibilants rather than five: the grammarians recorded the sibilants the language has and did not fill out a grid for its own sake.

The five voiced aspirates of Sanskrit, one in each varga, are among the strongest pieces of evidence in the reconstruction of the language family Sanskrit belongs to. The ancestor language is reconstructed with a series of them, and the descendants disposed of the series in different ways: Greek turned them into voiceless aspirates, Latin into fricatives in some positions and stops in others, the Germanic languages into plain voiced stops.

Sanskrit kept them. Because it kept them, it preserves distinctions that the other branches merged, and a word in Sanskrit can therefore show which of two reconstructed ancestors a Greek or Latin word descends from. That is a large part of why Sanskrit was so central to nineteenth-century comparative philology and why the grammars written in that period, Whitney's among them, are careful in their description of exactly these sounds. For a reader of this atlas the point is narrower: the fourth slot in each varga is not an ornament of the table but a real and unusual set of sounds, and the completeness of the Sanskrit stop system is a historical fact about the language rather than a tidiness imposed by its grammarians. Whitney's grammar, from which much of the phonetic description in this atlas is drawn, was written at the height of that comparative work and describes the Sanskrit sounds with an eye to what they show about the wider family. That is worth knowing when reading it, because it explains the weight it gives to features a purely descriptive grammar of the classical language might have passed over quickly.