Tibetan Nya ཉ

Nya is the eighth of the thirty consonants and the nasal that closes the palatal line. It writes a palatal nasal, the sound of Spanish n with a tilde or of the ni in English onion, and Tibetan allows it to stand at the beginning of a word where English cannot. Nyi ma, the sun, opens with it.

Like the other nasals of the recitation it carries low tone as an initial in modern Lhasa speech, keeping company with the letters that were voiced in the classical language. It takes a superscript from any of ra, la or sa, and it plays no part itself in the prefix, suffix, superscript or subscript systems, so it belongs entirely to the recitation and to the root of a syllable.

Its position completes the second of the eight lines and closes the second of the four repetitions of the same pattern. Four letters, one place of articulation, running unaspirated, aspirated, voiced, nasal. The velars have done it, the palatals have now done it, and the dentals and labials will do it twice more before the recitation reaches the letters that do not fit a grid at all.

The bare syllable is also an ordinary Tibetan word. Nya is the word for fish, so the letter is met as vocabulary almost as soon as it is met as a shape. That is true of a good many of the thirty, and teachers make use of it: the recitation is full of syllables that are also words, and the words give the shapes something to hang on.

A Tibetan dictionary cannot be searched the way an English one can, because the first letter written is often not the letter the word is filed under.

Words are ordered by the root letter, the ming gzhi, which is the letter at the centre of the syllable stack. Prefixes are stepped over. Superscripts are stepped over. Only when the root letters agree do the other elements come into play, and then in a fixed order of their own: superscript, then subscript, then vowel, then suffix. A syllable written with five letters may therefore sit in the section of the second letter written, or the third.

The practical consequence is that a reader has to be able to parse a stack before it can be looked up, and parsing a stack means knowing which letters may occupy which slots. That is why the five prefixes, the ten suffixes, the three superscripts and the four subscripts are drilled early: they are not trivia about the alphabet, they are the index.

Modern dictionaries and search interfaces vary in how much of this they hide. Some accept a Wylie string and sort it for the user, some expect the root letter, and some offer both. But the underlying order is the traditional one, and any Tibetan reference work, from a canonical catalogue to a word list at the back of a grammar, assumes it.