Avestan Aee 𐬇

This letter writes the held form of the reduced central vowel. A long schwa is an unusual thing for a script to provide for, since the sound is by nature indistinct, and giving it a sign of its own is a decision about what the text is for. 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 eighth in the alphabet as a whole and eighth of the sixteen vowel letters, between Avestan Ae and Avestan E. 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. One sign to one sound is the rule this alphabet works to, and it is easier to state than to keep. Most scripts break it somewhere, usually where a sound is rare enough that no scribe could be bothered, and the interest of this one lies in how few exceptions it allows itself.

A held reduced vowel is a distinction that only survives where somebody is listening. It is preserved here because the alphabet was made for a text that is recited rather than read silently. A script made in the Sasanian period for a text composed a thousand years and more earlier is an act of preservation rather than of composition. Nothing was being written down for the first time. What was being done was the fixing, in a form that would not drift, of something priests already held in memory. The script was put to a second use as well.

Pazand is Middle Persian written in Avestan letters, taken up precisely because those letters record vowels and the Pahlavi ones did not, and it is the clearest practical demonstration of what the alphabet was good for. In the digital record the letter is encoded at U+10B07 AVESTAN LETTER AEE. 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. For the community the value of a script that writes every sound is continuity. It makes it possible to check a recitation against a page rather than against another reciter's memory, which is what the alphabet was for and what it still does.