Tibetan Ka ཀ

A Tibetan child learning to write begins with ka, and so does every grammar, every code chart and every recitation of the alphabet. The thirty consonants are laid out in eight lines, seven of four letters and a last of two, and ka opens the first of them.

The letter writes a voiceless unaspirated velar stop and carries the inherent vowel a, so the bare sign is read ka and not k. That inherent vowel is not decoration. It is what makes the Tibetan script an abugida rather than an alphabet, and it is why the four vowel signs are described as replacing a vowel rather than as supplying one.

In the mechanics of the syllable, ka is a root letter and nothing else. It can carry a superscript above it, a subscript beneath it and a vowel sign as well, so a single stack built on ka can run to four written elements read as one syllable. What ka never does is the reverse work: it is not one of the five prefixes, not one of the ten suffixes, not one of the three superscripts and not one of the four subscripts. That restriction is worth noticing early, because roughly a third of the thirty letters do carry such duties and the difference between the two groups is the whole of Tibetan orthography.

Because it is first, ka has become the name of the thing. Ka kha ga nga stands for the alphabet in ordinary speech much as ABC does in English, and a grammarian reaching for a specimen consonant to demonstrate a rule reaches for ka by reflex.

The Tibetan letters do duty as an ordering series in the way that a, b, c do in English, and the place a reader is most likely to meet that use is on the spine of a book.

The two great canonical collections of Tibetan Buddhism, the Kangyur of translated word and the Tengyur of translated treatise, run to more than three hundred volumes between them in the printed editions. Their volumes are not numbered with digits. They are lettered, ka first, then kha, ga, nga and onward through the thirty, and when the thirty are exhausted the series continues with doubled forms. A citation of a canonical text therefore reads as a letter and a folio rather than as a volume number and a page, and a scholar who wants to follow a reference has to know the order of the alphabet as an ordinal sequence and not merely as a set of shapes.

The same habit runs through ordinary writing. Sections of a treatise, the branches of an outline, the items of a list and the parts of a woodblock set are all marked with ka, kha, ga and the rest. Tibetan does have its own digits and uses them freely for dates and quantities, so this is a choice rather than a shortage: the letters carry sequence and the digits carry number, and the two systems sit side by side without competing.

It is a small thing that changes how the alphabet is held in the mind. Ka is not only a sound. It is also the word for first.