Siddham Ttha 𑖙

Ttha is the aspirated partner of the retroflex stop that heads the class, and it takes the second slot as the aspirate does in every one of the five groups. Once a learner has the rule of the class, the position tells the sound: same tongue position as the letter before it, voiceless as that letter is, with breath released after the closure.

It is uncommon in the inherited vocabulary of Sanskrit. Where it occurs, the word is often one the language absorbed rather than one it built, which is a general property of the retroflex series and a reason the series has been studied so closely by historical linguists.

Its rarity does not affect its position, which is fixed by the shape of the table. The five classes are each a complete crossing of two features against one point of articulation, and a class missing a member would break the regularity that makes every other member predictable. That regularity is what allows the table to be recited forward from any starting point, which is how it was taught in India and how it was taught in Japan.

On the page it takes the vowel marks and the inherent short a like any consonant sign, and it enters conjuncts, though its low frequency means few of those combinations are common enough to have acquired distinctive shapes.

Sanskrit as it is described by the grammarians is a language with sharply defined boundaries, and one of the interesting things the letter table records is the traffic across them. The retroflex series is the clearest instance. It has no counterpart in the languages Sanskrit is related to outside India, it does have counterparts in the Dravidian languages of the subcontinent, and a substantial share of the Sanskrit words containing retroflex stops are either loans or words of no established derivation.

The letters are therefore evidence in an argument about contact. Whatever the ultimate explanation, and there is more than one position on it among linguists, a language that develops a full second series of stops and keeps it distinct for the whole of its recorded history has done something its relatives did not, and the script records the outcome without commenting on the cause.

Buddhist Sanskrit adds a further layer. The Buddhist literature includes a great deal of vocabulary from the spoken languages of northern India, personal and place names from many regions, and terms taken in from outside the Sanskrit tradition entirely, so a Buddhist text uses a wider inventory of shapes than a classical literary one. A scribe copying such material in Siddham met letters and clusters that a copyist of court poetry might rarely have written.