Tatta ਤ

Tatta is the twenty-first letter of the Gurmukhi painti and opens the dental series, the fourth of the five and the second row the alphabet devotes to a t-like sound. The difference between this row and the retroflex row five letters earlier is where the tongue makes contact. A retroflex consonant is made with the tip curled back against the roof of the mouth; a dental one is made with the tip against the upper teeth, further forward, and the release is lighter.

In Punjabi these are two distinct consonants and not two ways of saying one, so a word written with Tatta is a different word from the same shape written with Ṭainka. English complicates the comparison rather than helping it, because the English t is made at the ridge behind the teeth, between the two Punjabi positions and identical to neither. Punjabi speakers hear it as nearer the retroflex, which is why English words borrowed into Punjabi are commonly written with the retroflex row rather than this one, and why a Punjabi accent in English is often described as sounding retroflex. Tatta itself is a high frequency letter and opens a large family of Punjabi words. Its written form is a stem from the headline with a hook to its right, and it is among the letters whose shape has changed least between manuscript and printed Gurmukhi.

Gurmukhi has its own set of ten digits, encoded and used alongside the letters, and their existence settles a question that readers arriving from the Hebrew or Greek alphabets often ask. In those scripts the letters double as numerals, so that each letter carries a numeric value and a whole interpretive tradition can be built on adding those values up.

Gurmukhi does nothing of the kind. Numbers are written with number signs, letters are written with letters, and no letter of the painti has an assigned numerical value in any Sikh source. The atlas states this positively rather than leaving the field blank, because an empty column invites a reader to assume the value has merely not been recorded yet, and because the temptation to import gematria into a script that has no equivalent is a real one. What Gurmukhi does count is pages.

Printed editions of the Guru Granth Sahib follow a standard pagination in which every copy carries the same text on the same page, so that a passage can be cited by page number and found in any volume anywhere. That fixed pagination is one of the more remarkable features of the Sikh scriptural tradition and it is a form of numeration built on the book rather than on the alphabet. Tatta appears on a very large number of those pages, and on none of them does it stand for a number.