Tibetan Pa པ

Pa is the thirteenth of the thirty consonants and opens the fourth line, the labials, made with the two lips. It writes a voiceless unaspirated p and, carrying the inherent vowel, is read pa. In modern Lhasa speech it takes high tone and has merged with pha, as the first two members of every line have merged.

Within the alphabet it is a root letter and nothing more. It takes superscripts and it takes the ya and ra subscripts, but it is not a prefix, a suffix, a superscript or a subscript itself.

Its subscript behaviour is worth flagging, because it is the clearest case in the script of writing and speech parting company. Pa with a subjoined ya is not pronounced as a p followed by a glide. In modern Lhasa speech the labials with a ya subscript are heard as palatals, so the stack that a learner would read as pya comes out closer to cha. The spelling is not wrong and the pronunciation is not careless; the two are related by a rule, and the rule has to be learnt as part of learning the letter.

Pa is also the letter of one of the most frequent grammatical elements in the language, which the following article takes up.

In modern Lhasa speech pa carries high tone, and it belongs with ka, ca and ta to the set of first-column letters that have merged with their aspirated partners. The merger is complete across all four of the regular lines, which is why the first two columns of the grid are now a distinction of spelling.

Open any page of written Tibetan and the syllable pa, or its variant ba, will be on it several times. It is the nominalising particle, and its job is to turn a verb or a phrase into a thing: an act into an actor, a process into a fact, a clause into something a sentence can be built around.

It is also part of a great many ordinary words, and it attaches to the ends of names and titles, so a reader meets it as a suffix on vocabulary as much as a piece of live grammar. Whether pa or ba appears is determined by the letter that ends the preceding syllable, which is one of a family of such rules in Tibetan: the case particles, the connective particles and the ending particles all take a form dictated by the final of the syllable before them.

That is a distinctive feature of the language and it has a practical effect on reading. The particles are short, they are frequent, and their shape is predictable from context, so an experienced reader stops decoding them and begins to see them as punctuation, marking where a clause turns. A learner who has not yet reached that point finds the same syllables the hardest part of the page, because they are the parts that are not vocabulary and cannot be looked up profitably.

The letter pa, in other words, is met far more often as grammar than as the head of a word.