Ttha: The Second Retroflex

Ttha is the twelfth consonant of the varnamala, the voiceless aspirated retroflex and the second member of the third varga. Its place is fixed by the same five-step pattern that governs every class, and it differs from the retroflex before it only by the release of breath that follows the closure. Its usual romanisation, a t with a dot beneath followed by an h, is a compound notation representing two independent features, retroflexion and aspiration, and the scholarly transliteration systems are built around exactly that principle: each feature gets a mark, so that a reader can reconstruct the Devanagari letter from the Latin one without ambiguity.

Systems that instead spell Sanskrit sounds with the nearest English letter pairs lose the distinction and are the reason the same word turns up spelled several ways in popular writing. The retroflex series is comparatively thin in inherited Sanskrit vocabulary and much better filled in the modern Indo-Aryan languages, so a page of Hindi shows these letters far more often than a page of classical Sanskrit does. That difference in frequency between the classical and the modern use of one part of the table runs through several letters and is worth holding in view.