Avestan Be 𐬠

The sound is a plain b, the same closure of the lips as p with the vocal folds running. The labial letters come after the dentals, the ordering having worked steadily forward from the soft palate to the lips. Four signs cover the region: the two stops and the two fricatives that answer to them, voiceless before voiced in each pair. It stands thirty-third in the alphabet as a whole and seventeenth of the thirty-eight consonants, between Avestan Fe and Avestan Bhe. Nothing in that placement was handed down. The sequence was arranged by whoever assembled the alphabet, and it records their view of how the sounds of the language stand in relation to one another.

The people who drew up this alphabet were not recording a language they spoke. Avestan had ceased to be anybody's mother tongue centuries before, and what they had in front of them was a recitation preserved by priests who had learned it by ear. The letters record that recitation, sound by sound, at the level of detail the reciters maintained. The alphabet is often described as one of the most phonetically exact writing systems of the ancient world. The description is fair, and the reason for it is narrow: the script had one job, and that job rewarded precision far more than it rewarded speed.

A plain b is provided for as carefully as the rarest sound in the alphabet. The completeness is what makes the script usable for its one purpose, because nothing in the recitation is left without a sign. 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+10B20 AVESTAN LETTER BE. The block covers the letters together with a small set of punctuation marks used in the manuscripts. Standardising it settled, for digital purposes at least, a question the printed editions had answered in several different ways, which is how many letters the alphabet has. Zoroastrianism is a living religion with a small community, and the Avesta is its liturgy rather than its archive. The letters of this alphabet are therefore not an antiquarian matter. They record sounds a priest is still expected to produce.