Avestan Ngye 𐬣

This letter writes the velar nasal coloured by a glide towards the hard palate. It stands to the plain nasal exactly as the palatalised fricative earlier in the alphabet stands to the plain fricative, and the parallel is not an accident. The nasals are where the alphabet's habit of building in series is easiest to see. The velar nasal has palatalised and rounded partners exactly as the velar fricative does, and the dental nasal has a palatal partner and a positionally restricted one, so the group is a small grid rather than a list. It stands thirty-sixth in the alphabet as a whole and twentieth of the thirty-eight consonants, between Avestan Nge and Avestan Ngve. 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. 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.

The parallel between the palatalised nasal and the palatalised fricative is a structural fact about the alphabet, not a coincidence in its letter list. Whoever drew it up was thinking in series rather than in individual signs. Book Pahlavi is the hand behind these letterforms, and the relationship between the two is one of correction. In that writing a number of originally distinct sounds had come to share a single shape, so reading it depends on recognising words rather than on assembling them from letters.

The Avestan alphabet takes the same pen strokes and separates what had merged. Because the surviving copies are late, the evidence for what any individual letter did rests on the consistency of the manuscript tradition rather than on early witnesses. Where the copies agree, editors follow them; where they do not, the disagreement is recorded rather than settled by preference. In the digital record the letter is encoded at U+10B23 AVESTAN LETTER NGYE. 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.