Tibetan Sha ཤ

Sha is the twenty-seventh of the thirty consonants and writes a voiceless palato-alveolar fricative, the sh of English ship. It carries high tone as an initial in modern Lhasa speech.

It is the voiceless counterpart of zha in the sixth line, and the pair sha and zha stands to sa and za as the palatals stand to the dentals, which is a symmetry the recitation makes audible even though the lines are otherwise not organised by place.

Sha sits in the seventh line between ra and la on one side and sa on the other, and it is unlike its neighbours in a way worth noting. Ra, la and sa carry almost the whole weight of the Tibetan stacking system between them, appearing as superscripts, subscripts and suffixes. Sha does none of that. It is a root letter only, and appears in no prefix, suffix, superscript or subscript position, so it shares a line with the three busiest letters in the alphabet and has no office at all.

That is a reminder that the lines of the recitation are containers rather than categories once the first four are past.

Sha takes superscripts and the wa subscript. In the transcription of Sanskrit it also has a reversed counterpart, used for the retroflex sibilant that Sanskrit distinguishes and Tibetan does not, so the letter is one of the small set that has a mirror image standing outside the alphabet.

Most of the Tibetan books that survive in quantity were printed, and printed from carved wooden blocks rather than from movable type. A page was written out, pasted face down on a prepared block, and cut away so that the letters stood in relief and in reverse; the block was then inked and pressed against paper, and could be stored and reprinted for centuries.

The method suits the script. Tibetan writing stacks vertically, with superscripts, subscripts and vowel signs assembled around a root letter, so a syllable is a two-dimensional object rather than a row of separable pieces. Movable type has to cut every combination or accept ugly compromises; a block cutter simply cuts what the calligrapher wrote.

Large printing houses were established at monastic centres from the fifteenth century onward, and the great eastern establishments of the eighteenth century produced editions of the canon whose blocks were held as an institutional asset and reprinted on demand. The printed page keeps the format of the manuscript it descends from: long, narrow, unbound folios stacked between boards, written on both sides, with the volume identified by a letter rather than a number.

The scribal hand behind the block is dbu can, the headed script, because it is the formal hand and because its separated, upright letters cut cleanly. Cursive Tibetan is written and not printed.