Alphabet Letters
Siddham Dda 𑖚
Siddham Letters
Citation Formats
General Reference
APA Style
BibTeX
Origin The Siddhamatrka hand from which Siddham takes its form grows out of the late Brahmi of the Gupta period and is current in Indian inscriptions and manuscripts from about the sixth century CE.
Dda is the third letter of the retroflex class of the Siddham syllabary, the voiced counterpart of the stop that heads the class, made at the same curled-back position with the vocal cords engaged. In the modern Indian scripts descended from the same Brahmi stock the corresponding letter takes a dot beneath it to write a flap that classical Sanskrit did not treat as a separate sound. Siddham, which had ceased to be written in India before those conventions settled, has no such mark, so reading a Siddham manuscript means reading the classical inventory rather than a later one. Its place in the class is fixed by voicing alone, since the point of articulation is shared with the four letters around it.
Facts
Origins
Origin PeriodThe Siddhamatrka hand from which Siddham takes its form grows out of the late Brahmi of the Gupta period and is current in Indian inscriptions and manuscripts from about the sixth century CE. 3Tradition: Indian epigraphy Place of OriginNorthern India 3Tradition: Indian epigraphy Origin of the NameNamed by its own sound. Siddham letter names are the sound itself, as in the other Brahmic syllabaries, rather than borrowed words as in the Greek and Semitic alphabets. 1Tradition: Sanskrit phonetics of the grammarians Sense of the Namethe voiced retroflex stop; third of the retroflex class 4Tradition: The Siddham syllabary in its traditional order Identity
Script TypeConsonant sign of a Brahmi-derived abugida; it carries the inherent short a unless a dependent vowel sign is written 1 PositionTwenty-seventh letter of the Siddham order, third of the retroflex class 1Tradition: Sanskrit phonetics of the grammarians Attributions
Associated SoundVoiced unaspirated retroflex stop 2Tradition: Sanskrit phonetics of the grammarians Attestation
Meaning in the Attesting SourcePreserved in East Asia after the script had ceased to be written in India, and studied in Japan as shittan, the discipline of Sanskrit letter study transmitted through Chinese Buddhist translation. 5Tradition: East Asian esoteric Buddhism Learn More
Dda: The Siddham Letter
Dda is the voiced member of the retroflex class, made at the same curled-back position as the letter that heads it with the vocal cords engaged. It differs from that letter by voicing alone, and it holds the third slot as the voiced stop does in each of the other four classes.
The letter is not frequent in classical Sanskrit, and much of its occurrence is in words of the same kinds that carry the other retroflex stops. Within a word, between vowels, the sound it writes had already begun to be pronounced in some varieties of Indo-Aryan as a flap rather than a stop, and the later scripts of northern India developed a way of marking that.
Siddham did not. The convention of writing a dot beneath the letter to mark the flap settled in India after Siddham had ceased to be written there, so the script carries the classical inventory and nothing that came afterwards. Reading a Siddham manuscript therefore means reading the sound system as the grammarians described it, without the distinctions that later Indian writing added for later stages of the languages.
That gives the script a particular value and a particular limitation. It is a good witness to what it was made for and a poor one for anything later, which is true of most scripts frozen by transmission into another culture.
The Later Conventions Siddham Never Received
A script that stays in use changes with the languages written in it. Devanagari and its neighbours picked up a series of adjustments over the centuries after Siddham left India: a dot under a letter to mark the retroflex flap, another to mark a borrowed f, another for sounds taken in from Persian and Arabic, punctuation, and conventions for numerals and abbreviation. None of it reached Siddham, because by then Siddham was somewhere else.
What was preserved in East Asia was the script as it stood when it was received, kept in use for a purpose that never required it to write anything but Sanskrit. It did not have to accommodate a changing spoken language, a new administrative vocabulary or a foreign literature, so it did not change in the ways a working script does.
The result is a script that is unusually clean as a witness and unusually narrow as a tool. It records the classical sound inventory precisely and it cannot write a modern Indian language properly at all. That is worth saying because it cuts against an easy assumption: Siddham is not an ancestor of Devanagari that stopped halfway, it is a sibling that was taken out of circulation and kept, and the differences between the two are largely things that happened to the other one after they parted.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Belongs to Tradition
Shingon writes Sanskrit in Siddham and has done since the school was founded, keeping the script in use in Japan long after it had ceased to be written in India. The letters are studied as a set under the name shittan, and the contemplative practices attached to particular syllables are transmitted by initiation.
Tendai, the other Japanese school carrying an esoteric transmission, keeps the same letters in liturgical and inscriptional use. Siddham on a Japanese grave marker or a ritual implement may belong to either school, and the letters themselves are common to both.
Derived From
Siddham continues the Brahmi order letter for letter. The descent runs through the late Brahmi of the Gupta period and the Siddhamatrka hand that grows out of it, so this is a lineage rather than a direct copy of the older shape.
Originates in Language
The letter is named by its own Sanskrit sound and holds the place the Sanskrit phoneticians gave that sound in their analysis. Siddham was made to write this language, and the East Asian schools that preserved the script preserved it as a way of writing Sanskrit rather than adapting it to a local tongue.
Related To
The same letter of the same order in Devanagari. The two scripts are separate descendants of the same late Brahmi stock rather than one being taken from the other, which is why the sound value and the position agree while the shapes do not.
Sources
Reader Challenges (0 open reader challenges)
No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.
Sign in to dispute this or suggest a correction.
View At A Past Year
The atlas records no dated fact of its own for this entry, so there is no other year to choose.