Khojki Letter Ta

It represents an unaspirated dental “t” consonant. The tongue touches the upper teeth; “unaspirated” means no strong puff of breath follows.

Khojki consonants normally carry a short vowel unless a virama mark cancels it; vowel signs can alter the vowel. So 𑈙 can contribute to different syllables while staying the same letter.

How did Khojki become a literary script?

Khojki follows the old South Asian Brahmi writing model and belongs to the Sindhi branch of Landa, a family of scripts used for trade. It is closely related to Lohānākī, a Landa form used by the Lohānā community. Pieces of inscribed pottery found at Banbhore are dated to the eighth century and identified as Lohānākī or Lārī; they may be precursors. The oldest Khojki manuscript in an academic collection is dated to 1737.

The name Khojki comes from the Persian honorific khwajah, “master” or “lord,” a title used in the Lohānā community. The script was also called Sindhi or the Khwajah Sindhi script. Khojki was adapted from trade writing for Ismaili religious literature; it became a principal written form for gināns, devotional poems of the Ismaili Muslim community, as well as texts in Sindhi, Kutchi, Gujarati, Persian, and Arabic.

In 1903, Laljibhai Devraj developed metal type for Khojki printing at the Khoja Sindhi Printing Press in Bombay (now Mumbai). Gurmukhi, used for Sikh texts, developed separately as another literary script based on Landa, not as Khojki’s ancestor. As language use shifted, Gujarati replaced Khojki in Gujarat and Arabic in Sindh.