Avestan She 𐬱

The sound is a voiceless palato-alveolar sibilant, which English spells sh. The tongue is drawn a little further back than for s and the channel it makes is wider. Six sibilant letters is the alphabet's most conspicuous extravagance and its best argument. Four of the six write sounds in the sh region that most writing systems gather under a single sign, and the manuscripts are consistent about which of the four a given word takes. It stands fiftieth in the alphabet as a whole and thirty-fourth of the thirty-eight consonants, between Avestan Ze and Avestan Zhe. That position is not arbitrary. The sequence follows a scheme, vowels before consonants and consonants by place of articulation, and each letter's place in it is a statement about the sound.

Zoroastrian worship treats the correct sounding of the Avesta as part of the act itself. A priest is expected to produce the words as they have been received, and a sign that could stand for either of two sounds would put that in doubt. The size of this letter list follows from the requirement and not from any love of complication. 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.

This is the first of four sh type signs, and the group is the strongest single piece of evidence for how fine a distinction the script was built to carry. Most writing systems make do with one. Vowel writing is the innovation that separates this alphabet from everything else written in Iran at the time. The letterforms are Pahlavi and the right to left direction is Pahlavi. The vowels are not: they are full letters, and they come first in the order.

No Avestan manuscript survives from earlier than the thirteenth century of the common era. Every copy in existence is therefore many centuries younger than the alphabet, and the alphabet is many centuries younger again than the words. What reaches a modern edition has passed through both gaps. In the digital record the letter is encoded at U+10B31 AVESTAN LETTER SHE. The Avestan block sits wholly in the supplementary planes, and every letter in it takes four bytes in the encoding most of the web runs on. That is the practical reason Avestan text is still uncommon online, and why a page carrying it depends on the reader having a font that covers the range. What this alphabet holds is a performance. The atlas describes it and does not instruct in it: the recitation belongs to the community that maintains it, and the interest here is in what the script was built to do and how well it did it.