Ba is the fifteenth of the thirty consonants and the voiced member of the labial line. It was a voiced b in the classical language; as a modern Lhasa initial it is an unaspirated p carrying low tone, the voicing having been converted into pitch.
Like ga and da it does double duty in the spelling system, serving as one of the five prefixes and one of the ten suffixes. In its prefix role it is silent by definition. In its suffix role it is very often not heard either, or is reduced to an effect on the vowel in front of it. A written syllable may therefore carry two ba letters that a listener never receives, one at each end.
That is the sharpest illustration of a feature of Tibetan that is easy to state and hard to accept: the writing and the speech are separated by a large and systematic gap. The letters are not decorative and the spelling is not arbitrary, but a good many of the letters on the page are recording the language of the seventh century rather than the sounds of the twenty-first.
Ba is also the alternant of the particle pa, so it appears constantly as a piece of grammar as well as at the head of words.
Ba takes superscripts and the ya, ra and la subscripts. As an initial in modern Lhasa speech it belongs with ga, ja, da, dza, zha and za to the set of letters whose classical voicing now shows as low tone rather than as anything in the consonant itself.