Tibetan Nga ང

Nga is the fourth of the thirty consonants and the nasal that closes the velar line. It writes the sound English spells ng in sing, and unlike English it is free to begin a word: nga is the ordinary Tibetan for I, and a speaker uses it constantly.

Its position follows the inherited Indian arrangement exactly. Each of the first lines runs through its stops and then closes on the nasal formed at the same point in the mouth, so a reciter passes from ka to kha to ga and lands on nga, the velar nasal, before moving forward to the palatals. The pattern is the reason the recitation is memorable: the mouth works from the back to the front in four steps and repeats the same manner sequence at each stop.

Nga is one of the ten suffixes and closes a very large number of Tibetan syllables. It is not among the five prefixes, so unlike ga and da it does its extra work only at the end of a syllable and never at the beginning. As an initial it carries low tone in modern Lhasa speech, in company with the other nasals and with the letters that were voiced in the classical language.

For an English reader the letter is a small correction to an assumption. The sound is not a cluster of n and g, and it is not confined to the middle and end of words; it is a single consonant that Tibetan treats as fully as usable at the front of a word as any other.

A Tibetan syllable is a stack, and the stack has slots. Reading the writing means knowing which slot each letter is sitting in, and the slot after the root is the suffix, the rjes jug.

Ten of the thirty letters may take that position: ga, nga, da, na, ba, ma, the small a, ra, la and sa. Two of those ten, da in the classical language and sa still, may be followed by a further letter in a second suffix slot. Everything else is barred from the end of a syllable, so a reader who sees a letter after the root already knows it belongs to a set of ten and can rule out the other twenty at once.

The suffix does far more than close the syllable. In the modern language it reshapes the vowel in front of it, so that the same written vowel is heard differently depending on what follows, and a syllable therefore cannot be read letter by letter from left to right and assembled at the end. It also carries grammar: many of the case particles and verb endings of written Tibetan are suffixes or begin with one.

Between one syllable and the next stands the tsheg, a small raised dot. It is not a space and it is not a hyphen; it marks where one stack ends and the next begins, and without it the string of letters would be unreadable, because Tibetan does not otherwise separate its words.