Avestan De 𐬛

The sound is a plain d, the same dental closure as t with the vocal folds running. It is among the most ordinary sounds in the language and the alphabet gives it a letter as plain as itself. The dentals are the largest of the stop groups in this alphabet. Their five signs cover a voiced and a voiceless stop, a voiced and a voiceless fricative, and one sign whose use is governed by where in a word it falls rather than by a sound of its own. It stands twenty-eighth in the alphabet as a whole and twelfth of the thirty-eight consonants, between Avestan The and Avestan Dhe. The order is the work of the people who devised the alphabet rather than an inheritance from anywhere, and reading the list straight through recovers the analysis they were working from.

Comparison makes the point quickly. Book Pahlavi, the hand this alphabet was drawn from, had let so many sounds converge on shared shapes that reading it depends heavily on already knowing the word. The Avestan alphabet takes that apart and assigns one sign to each sound, which is why it needs fifty-four of them. Whoever devised the alphabet is not recorded. The script can be dated and placed with reasonable confidence, but no source names the person or the group responsible, and the atlas records that absence rather than filling it.

The voiced dental stop is unremarkable in itself, and that is the point. The alphabet provides for the ordinary sounds as carefully as for the rare ones, so that nothing in the recitation falls outside what the page can hold. 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+10B1B AVESTAN LETTER DE. The whole Avestan block lies above the Basic Multilingual Plane, so each character needs a surrogate pair in the encodings that use them, and a font carrying the script is required before anything appears on a screen at all. 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.