Tibetan La ལ

La is the twenty-sixth of the thirty consonants, an alveolar lateral. Like ra it belongs to all three of the stacking systems: it is one of the three superscripts, one of the four subscripts, and one of the ten suffixes.

Written above a root letter as the la mgo it is silent in modern Lhasa speech and the syllable takes high tone in its place. Written below, it produces a value of its own. Written after, it closes the syllable.

The syllable la is also the commonest particle in written Tibetan. It marks the dative and the locative, it appears in a range of adverbial and verbal constructions, and it turns up in almost every sentence of any length. A reader therefore meets the letter far more often as a piece of grammar than as the head of a word, in the same way as with pa.

Because the particle is so frequent and so short, it is one of the first things a learner stops decoding and starts seeing. A page of Tibetan read at speed is parsed largely by its particles, and la is the one that appears most.

La is not among the five prefixes either, so like ra it takes every position in the syllable except the first.

As an initial it carries low tone in modern Lhasa speech. Its behaviour as a subscript is the least predictable of the four, because a root letter with a subjoined la is pronounced in a way that follows from neither of the two letters taken alone and simply has to be learnt with the words that contain it.

Tibetan has described its own grammar for a very long time, and the description is still the framework in which the language is taught inside the tradition.

Two short root texts stand at the head of it. The first, known as the Thirty, sets out the letters and the elements of the syllable. The second, known as the Guide to Signs, treats the prefixes and the rules governing which particle form follows which final. Both are attributed by tradition to Thonmi Sambhota, the seventh-century minister credited with bringing the script from India, and both are very brief, in verse, and effectively unusable without a commentary. Around them has grown a large commentarial literature, and it is through those commentaries that the material is actually studied.

Modern scholarship treats the attribution with caution and the texts as later than the tradition holds, without disputing that a grammatical tradition of considerable age exists. The vocabulary this atlas uses for the letters comes from that tradition and not from Western linguistics: sum cu for the thirty consonants, dbyangs for the vowel signs, sngon jug and rjes jug for prefix and suffix, mgo can and btags for superscript and subscript, ming gzhi for the root letter.

Using the tradition and its own terms is a choice with a consequence. It describes the script as its users describe it, and it does not flatten those categories into the nearest European equivalent.