Tibetan Ga ག

Ga is the third of the thirty consonants and the voiced member of the velar line. In the classical language it was a voiced g. In modern Lhasa speech an initial ga is heard as an unaspirated k carrying low tone, so the voicing has not survived as voicing; it has been converted into pitch, and the low reading of a syllable is often the only trace left of an initial that used to be voiced.

What sets ga apart from ka and kha is that it works in two systems at once. It is a letter of the recitation, and it is also a piece of the spelling apparatus: one of the five prefixes and one of the ten suffixes. In both of those roles it is written and is not pronounced as an initial. A prefixed ga sits in front of the root letter and does not sound. A suffixed ga closes a syllable, as in rig, and in the modern language it is reduced to little more than an effect on the vowel before it.

This double life is the first serious difficulty in Tibetan orthography, and it has a practical consequence for anyone using a dictionary. Because a written syllable may open with a letter that is not its root, a reader has to identify the root letter before a word can be looked up at all. Ga is one of the letters most often standing in the way, and learning to see past it is the beginning of reading Tibetan spelling rather than merely decoding it.

Five of the thirty letters may stand in front of a root letter as a prefix, the sngon jug: ga, da, ba, ma and the small a. No other letter of the thirty can occupy that slot, and the five are not interchangeable, since which prefix a given root takes is a property of the word and has to be learnt with it.

A prefix is written and is not pronounced. That statement is exact for the modern standard language and is the source of most of the apparent difficulty of Tibetan spelling: a syllable of two spoken sounds may be written with four or five letters, the first of which contributes nothing audible at all. What it does contribute is meaning, because prefixes distinguish words that would otherwise be spelled and spoken alike, and it contributes tone, because a prefix on a syllable can affect the pitch the syllable is given.

They were not always silent. The prefixes are generally understood to record initial consonant clusters that the language once had, and some of those clusters survive today in the dialects of Amdo, where a speaker may still produce a consonant that a Lhasa speaker has lost. Tibetan spelling is therefore conservative in the strict sense: it goes on recording a stage of the language that most speakers no longer pronounce.

The prefix slot is also the reason a Tibetan dictionary cannot be searched from the left. Words are ordered by their root letter, and the prefix is stepped over.