Tibetan Ba བ

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.

Every written language drifts from the speech it records, and Tibetan has drifted unusually far. Consonant clusters that the spelling still writes have been lost from the standard spoken language, voicing has been traded for tone, and syllables written with four or five letters are pronounced with two or three sounds.

It is tempting to read this as decay, and that reading is wrong in two ways. First, the spelling is not arbitrary: the silent letters are doing work, distinguishing words that would otherwise be identical and determining the tone the syllable is spoken on. A reader who knows the spelling can predict the pronunciation with fair reliability, which is not true of English. Second, the sounds the spelling records have not vanished everywhere. Dialects of the eastern regions, particularly in Amdo, retain clusters that Lhasa speech has lost, so the writing is closer to some living Tibetan than to others.

The comparison usually drawn is with English or French orthography, and it is only partly apt. Those systems fossilised largely by accident, through printing and inertia. Tibetan spelling was standardised deliberately, in periods of organised reform undertaken to make Buddhist translation consistent, so what looks like historical residue is in part the outcome of decisions taken about how the language should be written down.

The gap is real. It is not an accident.