Alphabet Letters
Avestan E 𐬈
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.
E writes the short front vowel and opens the second group of the vowel section, after the run of a-signs and before the o, i and u pairs. Like every vowel in this alphabet it is written as a full letter standing in the line, which is what most sharply separates Avestan from the Pahlavi hand it grew out of, where vowels were largely left for a reader to supply from knowledge of the word. The order of the letters follows the phonetic analysis behind the script rather than an inherited Semitic sequence. The vowels come first, in short and long pairs, and the consonants follow by place of articulation. The tradition calls the script din dabireh, the religion writing. It serves the Avesta and little else, which is why its repertoire tracks the sounds of that language and no other.
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 PositionNinth 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 SoundShort front e 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 short front vowel it writes, e, following the same transliteration convention rather than an inherited word. 1 Sense of the Namethe short vowel e 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+10B08 AVESTAN LETTER E 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 E: The Letter in the Avestan Alphabet
The sound is a short front e, made with the tongue raised towards the hard palate and the lips unrounded. It opens the front vowel group, after the run of a signs and before the back vowels. Writing a vowel as a full letter costs space and time, and every scribe who ever worked in a Semitic hand had reasons not to do it. This alphabet does it sixteen times over, which is a fair indication that legibility for a reader who already knew the words was not the goal. Reproducibility of a sound was. It stands ninth in the alphabet as a whole and ninth of the sixteen vowel letters, between Avestan Aee and Avestan Ee. 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. 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 E and the Break with the Semitic Inheritance
The front vowels are where the alphabet's independence from its Semitic ancestry shows most plainly. The tradition that supplied the letterforms had nothing corresponding to this range of vowel signs, and their presence is the work of the people who devised the script. 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+10B08 AVESTAN LETTER E. 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.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Related To
The short and long front e, set side by side in the vowel section in the usual order, short before long.
The long and short front e, set side by side in the vowel section in the usual order, short before long.
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