Tibetan Kha ཁ

Kha is the second of the thirty consonants and the aspirated partner of ka: the same closure at the soft palate, released with a breath the ear can hear. It takes the ya, ra and wa subscripts, and like ka it plays no part in the prefix, suffix or superscript systems.

The pairing is not local to the velar line. Tibetan inherited from the Indian ordering of sounds a grid in which each line of stops runs unaspirated, aspirated, voiced, nasal, and that shape repeats through the palatals, the dentals, the labials and the affricates. Kha stands in the second column, and so do cha, tha, pha and tsha directly beneath it. A learner who grasps the column has grasped five letters rather than one, which is why the alphabet is taught as a recitation with a rhythm rather than as a list to be memorised item by item.

Aspiration was a genuine contrast in the classical language and it remains one in the modern language, but it no longer works alone. In Lhasa speech the old unaspirated ka and the aspirated kha have fallen together as an aspirated k, and both carry high tone. The distinction the second column preserves is now a fact of spelling and of the older language rather than a difference a Lhasa speaker produces. Other dialects, particularly in Amdo, keep more of the older system, so what has merged depends on where the speaker is from.

Almost every Tibetan word an English reader meets in print arrives through a transliteration rather than in Tibetan letters, and the commonest of these systems is the Wylie transliteration, standard in scholarly writing since the late nineteen fifties. It is designed to be reversible: every Tibetan letter has exactly one roman equivalent, so a Wylie string can be turned back into Tibetan writing without loss and without guesswork.

That design has a cost, and kha is where the cost is clearest. The h in kha marks aspiration on the preceding letter. It is not a separate sound, it is not the h of hat, and the sequence is not a fricative. The same convention accounts for cha, tha, pha and tsha, none of which is the digraph an English eye expects: tha is a t released with a breath and has nothing to do with the th of thin, and pha is a p and never an f.

Because Wylie is a transliteration rather than a pronunciation guide, it also declines to tell a reader what a word sounds like. Silent prefixes, silent superscripts and silent suffixes are all written out, so a syllable spelled bsgrubs in Wylie carries six roman letters for a spoken syllable of two or three sounds. Phonetic renderings exist alongside it and are used in journalism and on signage, but they lose the spelling and cannot be reversed. The atlas follows the transliterated forms, because the letters are the subject.