Avestan Ce 𐬗

The sound is a voiceless palatal affricate, a t and an sh run together as a single articulation, which English spells ch in church. It opens the palatal group of the alphabet. The two palatal affricates stand together in the sequence, voiceless before voiced, in the position the phonetic ordering assigns them between the velars and the dentals. Each is a single articulation rather than a cluster of two, and the alphabet writes each with a single letter, which is the treatment it gives to every sound it recognises. It stands twenty-fourth in the alphabet as a whole and eighth of the thirty-eight consonants, between Avestan Ghe and Avestan Je. 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. Nothing about this letter was forced by the writing it came from.

The shapes are Pahlavi, but the inventory, the ordering and the decision to write vowels in full are the work of whoever assembled the alphabet, and they are decisions taken about a text rather than about a language. A reciter using this alphabet is not being taught the text. The priesthood that used it already knew the Avesta by heart, and the page served as a check on memory rather than as a substitute for it, which is why the script records fine detail a learner would never need.

The palatal affricates are among the sounds that mark the Iranian languages off from their Indic cousins, and the alphabet gives each of them a sign. Where they sit in the sequence follows from the phonetic ordering rather than from any tradition. The gap between the words and the writing is the central fact about this alphabet, and it runs in both directions. The Avesta is far older than the script, and every surviving manuscript is far younger, so the script sits between two long stretches of transmission and belongs wholly to neither.

The Zoroastrian communities that carried these manuscripts, in Iran and in western India, are small, and the copying was sustained by priestly families rather than by any large institution. That the texts survive at all is a consequence of that continuity. In the digital record the letter is encoded at U+10B17 AVESTAN LETTER CE. 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. 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.