Tibetan Da ད

Da is the eleventh of the thirty consonants and the voiced member of the dental line, a voiced d in the classical language and an unaspirated dental with low tone in modern Lhasa speech.

It carries more orthographic work than almost any other letter in the script. It is one of the five prefixes, standing in front of a root letter without being pronounced. It is one of the ten suffixes, closing a syllable. And in the classical language it was also the second suffix, a d written after another final consonant, known as the da drag or strong da. Three offices, none of them audible in the modern standard language, all of them written.

The consequence for a reader is that a da in a Tibetan syllable has to be placed before it can be read. Is it the root letter, or is it standing in front of one? Is it closing the syllable, or is it sitting after the letter that closes it? The answer determines the pronunciation, the tone and the meaning, and it is settled by knowing which letters may occupy which slots rather than by anything in the shape of the da itself.

This is the general condition of Tibetan writing rather than a peculiarity of one letter, but da is where it is most concentrated, and a grammar demonstrating the slot system will very often demonstrate it with da.

The classical language allowed a second suffix, a da written after a final consonant that had already closed the syllable. It is called the da drag, the strong da. It was never pronounced in the way an initial da is, and in the later orthography it was dropped from ordinary spelling altogether.

It did not vanish. It survives in canonical texts, in archaic and imperial-period documents, and in manuscripts copied from old exemplars by scribes who reproduced what was in front of them. So the presence of a da drag in a text is a signal, and a reader who notices it learns something about where the text has come from before reading a word of its content.

It is one of several such signals. Old Tibetan orthography has a small set of features that later spelling gave up: the reversed form of the vowel sign i, certain subscript combinations, particular spellings of common particles, and the da drag among them. Together they let a manuscript be placed in a rough relation to the great standardisations of the language, the revisions of vocabulary and spelling undertaken to regularise Buddhist translation.

None of this is decorative. Tibetan spelling was standardised deliberately, by decision and at a known period, and the archaisms are what the standardisation left behind. A scribe reproducing them is transmitting a text older than the rules being taught in his own day.