Ga: A Letter and a Piece of Machinery

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.