Tta: The Retroflex Class and What Makes It Distinctive

Tta is the eleventh consonant of the varnamala and the head of the third varga, the retroflex class. A retroflex sound is made with the tip of the tongue curled back to touch the roof of the mouth behind the ridge of the teeth, and the result is audibly different from the dental made a short distance in front of it. The Sanskrit phoneticians named the class murdhanya, from the word for the crown or top of the head, describing where they understood the contact to fall, and they placed it third in the table because the progression runs from the back of the mouth forwards and the retroflex point lies between the palate and the teeth.

A full series of retroflex stops is the feature that most sharply marks the languages of South Asia off from their relatives elsewhere, and it is shared across the region by languages of several unrelated families. Sanskrit has five retroflexes among the stops, a retroflex nasal, a retroflex sibilant and a retroflex vowel, so the position is used throughout the sound system rather than at one or two points. In classical Sanskrit many of the retroflexes that appear in written words are produced by rule rather than inherited: a dental consonant is converted into its retroflex counterpart in the neighbourhood of certain earlier sounds, and the change is stated with great precision in the grammar.