Devanagari Pha फ

Pha is the twenty-second consonant of the varnamala, the voiceless aspirated labial and the second member of the fifth varga. Like tha in the dental class, its usual romanisation misleads an English reader, who sees a letter pair that spells an f in English words of Greek origin. The Sanskrit sound is a p released with breath, and classical Sanskrit has no f at all. The scholarly transliteration systems mark aspiration with a following h precisely because they are marking a feature rather than spelling an English sound, and a reader who knows the convention can reconstruct the Devanagari letter from the Latin without ambiguity.

Modern Hindi and the other languages written with Devanagari do have an f, borrowed with vocabulary from Persian and Arabic, and they write it with this letter and a nukta dot beneath. That is one of several such dotted letters added to the script after the classical period for sounds the varnamala had no place for. Whether the dots are written at all varies by publisher and by speaker, since many speakers do not distinguish the borrowed sound from the native one, and Hindi orthography has been argued over on exactly this point for a century.

The Unicode Standard encodes both a combining nukta and a precomposed character for the dotted form of this letter, so the same Hindi word can be represented in two different sequences of codepoints. Software that compares or searches text has to normalise between them first, and a search that does not will fail to match a word against itself.

It is worth being explicit about what a phonetic table of one language does when other languages adopt it. The varnamala is an analysis of Sanskrit, and it is complete for Sanskrit: every consonant of the classical language has a place, and there are no places without a sound. When Hindi, Urdu's Devanagari-written registers, Marathi and the rest came to be written with the script, they brought sounds the analysis did not cover, chiefly from Persian and Arabic, and the script accommodated them by marking the nearest existing letter with a dot rather than by adding rows to the table or reordering it. That decision preserved the classical arrangement intact and kept the shared literacy that lets a reader of one Devanagari language sound out a text in another. It also means that the modern script carries a visible boundary between the classical analysis and everything added since, which is unusual and useful.

For this atlas the consequence is a rule about what to record. Each letter's value is its classical value, stated as the grammarians stated it; the modern dotted variants are recorded as modern additions where they exist; and no letter is given a numerical or symbolic value, because the Sanskrit tradition does not assign individual letters such values in the way Hebrew gematria and Greek isopsephy do.