Tibetan Na Ro ◌ོ

Na ro is the fourth and last of the Tibetan vowel signs and writes the vowel o. Like gi gu and greng bu it is placed above the consonant it modifies and replaces that consonant inherent a, so ka with na ro upon it is read ko.

With na ro the recitation of the alphabet is complete. Thirty consonants and four vowel signs, the sum cu and the dbyangs, are what a Tibetan child learns and what any grammar sets out first. Everything else in the writing system, the prefixes and suffixes, the superscripts and subscripts, the transcription apparatus for Sanskrit, is built on that inventory rather than added to it.

Na ro is dependent and cannot stand alone. Where a syllable begins with o the sign is written on a chen, the thirtieth consonant, and shown by itself it is displayed on a dotted circle. A doubled form writes the long o used in transcribing Sanskrit, a device Tibetan needs only for foreign words because its own language does not distinguish vowel length.

The name is the one part of this entry the atlas does not explain, for the reason given in the article beside it.

Na ro is recited last of the four, and Tibetan sorting compares the vowel signs in that same sequence, so a syllable carrying na ro files after one carrying greng bu where everything else about the two is equal.

Three of the four Tibetan vowel signs carry names that can be read against ordinary words. Zhabs kyu contains the honorific word for foot and describes a sign that hangs below its letter. Greng bu is read as the upright one, from a verb meaning to stand. Gi gu is glossed in the tradition as well.

Na ro is the exception. Readings are offered in the grammars and in the commentarial literature, and they do not agree with one another. This pass found no basis on which to prefer one, and no source it had checked that established an answer.

So the atlas states the sign, its value, its position and its behaviour, and declines to gloss the name. That is a deliberate choice rather than an omission. A plausible etymology nobody has checked is worse than a gap, because it will be repeated, and a reference work that guesses in one place cannot be relied on in the others.

The gap is recorded as an open question, held internally until it can be attributed to someone who posed it, with a note of what would close it: a study tracing the term through the earliest Tibetan grammatical treatises and their commentaries, establishing when it first appears and whether an early commentator glosses it, rather than a further proposal built on the modern shape of the words. That is a philological task, and it is a small one. It has simply not been done here.