Alphabet Letters
Avestan Aa 𐬁
Avestan Letters
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Origin Devised in the Sasanian period, commonly placed in the fifth or sixth century CE, long after the Avestan texts themselves were composed.
Aa writes the long open vowel, the held counterpart of A, and stands second in the alphabet immediately after it. Length is a distinction the Avestan reciters preserved and the earlier Pahlavi writing could not show, so a separate sign for it is one of the plainest gains the new script made. The pairing of a short sign with a long one, in that order, is the pattern the whole vowel section follows. The script was designed for a single text, and its unusual fineness of distinction follows from that. In Zoroastrian worship the sound of the recited word is itself the offering, so a sign that could stand for two sounds would be a defect. Avestan is written right to left, and its vowels are full letters standing in the line rather than marks hung on a consonant. That is the clearest break the script makes with the Pahlavi writing behind it.
Facts
Identity
Script TypeAn alphabet in the strict sense: its vowels are full letters standing in the line, not marks hung on a consonant, which is the sharpest break it makes with the Book Pahlavi writing it was drawn from. 1Tradition: The Avestan script PositionSecond of the sixteen vowel letters of the Avestan alphabet, which are set out in pairs of short and long before the consonants begin 2Tradition: The Avestan script How the Letter JoinsWritten right to left, with each sound kept to its own distinct sign. The Book Pahlavi hand behind it had let several sounds fall together into shared shapes, and undoing that ambiguity is what the Avestan alphabet was made for. 1Tradition: The Avestan script Attributions
Associated SoundLong open a, the held counterpart of the short vowel; vowel length changes words in Avestan and the script marks it throughout 1Tradition: Avestan phonology Origins
Origin PeriodDevised in the Sasanian period, commonly placed in the fifth or sixth century CE, long after the Avestan texts themselves were composed. 1Tradition: The Avestan script Place of OriginSasanian Iran, where the Zoroastrian priesthood assembled the written Avesta. 1Tradition: The Avestan script Origin of the NameNamed directly for the long open vowel it writes, aa, the held partner of A, following the same transliteration convention as every letter in this alphabet rather than an inherited word. 1 Sense of the Namethe long vowel a; the long partner of A 1Tradition: The Avestan script Transmission
Manuscript TraditionNo Avestan manuscript survives from earlier than the thirteenth century CE, so every witness to the script is many centuries younger than the script itself, and the script is younger again than the words it carries. 4Tradition: Zoroastrianism Practice
Liturgical and Scriptural RoleThe script exists to fix the sound of the Avesta, which is recited in Zoroastrian worship, a living practice with a small community. Its precision serves the requirement that the recited word be pronounced as it has been received. 3Tradition: Zoroastrianism Attestation
Meaning in the Attesting SourceEncoded at U+10B01 AVESTAN LETTER AA in the Avestan block, which lies wholly above the Basic Multilingual Plane. 2Tradition: The Avestan script Meaning in the Attesting SourceThe Avesta was transmitted orally by priests for centuries before any script existed to hold it. This alphabet records a recitation, not a composition, and the gap between the two is the central fact about it. 4Tradition: Zoroastrianism Learn More
Avestan Aa: The Letter in the Avestan Alphabet
This letter writes the long open a, the same vowel as its short partner but sustained. Nothing else separates the two: the tongue sits in the same place, the mouth opens to the same degree, and duration alone tells one word from another. The sixteen vowel letters come first in the sequence, before any consonant, and they are set out in pairs of short and long. The arrangement is inherited from nowhere. The tradition that supplied the letterforms had no such vowel series and no reason to order one this way, so the pattern comes from an analysis of the language the script was built to hold. It stands second in the alphabet as a whole and second of the sixteen vowel letters, between Avestan A and Avestan Ao. That position is not arbitrary. The sequence follows a scheme, vowels before consonants and consonants by place of articulation, and each letter's place in it is a statement about the sound.
Zoroastrian worship treats the correct sounding of the Avesta as part of the act itself. A priest is expected to produce the words as they have been received, and a sign that could stand for either of two sounds would put that in doubt. The size of this letter list follows from the requirement and not from any love of complication. Transliteration is where the size of the letter list becomes visible to a reader who does not know the script. A scholarly edition carries accents, dots, rings and length marks, and every one of those marks stands in for a separate Avestan letter that the Roman alphabet has no room for.
Avestan Aa and the Writing of Vowel Length
A separate sign for the long a is one of the plainest gains the new alphabet made over the writing behind it. Where the older hand could leave the length of a vowel to be inferred, the Avestan letter states it, and a reciter reading from the page is told how long to hold the sound. The shapes come from Pahlavi and the inventory does not. Whoever assembled this alphabet worked from an analysis of the recitation, added signs where the parent hand had none, and ordered the result by place of articulation instead of by the letter sequence that lay behind everything else written in Iran at the time.
Modern editions preserve the distinctions the manuscripts make, including the ones that look redundant, and transliterate them with accents, dots and length marks so that nothing collapses on the page. The apparatus of marks in a scholarly Avestan text is a direct consequence of how many separate signs the alphabet carries. In the digital record the letter is encoded at U+10B01 AVESTAN LETTER AA. The Avestan block sits wholly in the supplementary planes, and every letter in it takes four bytes in the encoding most of the web runs on. That is the practical reason Avestan text is still uncommon online, and why a page carrying it depends on the reader having a font that covers the range. What this alphabet holds is a performance. The atlas describes it and does not instruct in it: the recitation belongs to the community that maintains it, and the interest here is in what the script was built to do and how well it did it.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Related To
The short and long open a. The two differ in duration alone, and the alphabet sets them side by side, short first, which is the pattern every vowel pair in the script follows.
The long and short open a. The two differ in duration alone, and the alphabet sets them side by side, short first, which is the pattern every vowel pair in the script follows.
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