Tta: The Ranjana Letter

Tta opens the third row of the consonant grid, the retroflex class, and is its plain voiceless member. A retroflex consonant 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 sound is distinctly different from the dental made just behind the teeth, which occupies the following row. The two rows are the pair that most often defeats a learner from outside South Asia, because many languages have only one t and hear the two as versions of it. Sanskrit treats them as separate consonants in every position, so the chart carries ten letters where such a language would need five.

Ranjana inherits both rows and writes them as it writes any consonants. Retroflexion is one of the defining features of the South Asian linguistic area, shared across languages of quite different families, and a script that carries a full retroflex row is a script made for that part of the world regardless of which language it happens to be writing at any moment. The row also has a consequence for anyone reading Sanskrit in Latin script. Because most keyboards cannot produce the dot that marks a retroflex, a great deal of transliterated material silently merges the two rows, and a reader working only from such text has no way to recover the distinction the script keeps carefully.