Siddham Sha 𑖫

Sha is the palatal sibilant and the first of the three that open the last block of the consonant order. Sanskrit has three sibilants where most of the languages it is related to kept one, and the distinctions between them are held apart by rule rather than left to the ear, so a script that writes Sanskrit needs all three letters and Siddham has them.

The letter stands at the head of a large family of religious vocabulary, including the words for peace and for the auspicious and a great many names built on them, and it is frequent in the Buddhist texts copied in Siddham.

It enters conjuncts readily, and several of its combinations, particularly with the semivowels and with the stops of its own class, are common enough to have settled into shapes a learner acquires as units.

Its place in the order marks a transition. The twenty-five stops are behind it and the four semivowels are behind it, and what remains after this letter is the retroflex sibilant, the dental sibilant and the aspirate: four letters, and then the table closes.

The three sibilants also mark the point where the table stops being a grid. The twenty-five stops are a crossing of five places against five treatments, and the four semivowels are a block paired to four vowels, but the sibilants and the aspirate are a short closing list, classified by place and by nothing else. A learner reciting the order feels the change: the pattern that carried the first two thirds of the table runs out, and the last four letters have to be held individually.

The three-way sibilant distinction is one of the features that makes Sanskrit valuable as evidence about the history of its language family, and one of the features a script for it cannot do without. A palatal, a retroflex and a dental sibilant are three separate letters, three separate sounds and, in the grammar, three separate behaviours: the dental converts to the retroflex under stated conditions, the palatal does not, and clusters behave differently according to which is present.

Most of the related languages outside India merged them. Greek, Latin and the Germanic languages have one sibilant letter and no framework connecting it to anything, so a scholar working from those alone could not reconstruct what the Indian evidence shows. The Sanskrit table sets the three out explicitly, classified by point of articulation like everything else in it, and that classification is what makes the comparison possible.

Latin transliteration handles them badly. The palatal is usually written with an acute accent, the retroflex with a dot beneath, the dental as plain s, and dropping the diacritics collapses all three. Words that differ in the language become identical, and the grammar that depends on the difference becomes invisible. The letter pages of this atlas keep the distinction where the plain spellings used elsewhere cannot.