Alphabet Letters
Avestan The 𐬚
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.
The writes a voiceless dental fricative, the sound English spells th in thin, made where Te is made but with the air allowed through. Greek and English both have the sound and neither had a single-letter sign for it at the time this alphabet was drawn up. Giving it a letter of its own is the kind of decision that runs through the whole script, which is why it has fifty-four letters and its neighbours had far fewer. No Avestan manuscript survives from earlier than the thirteenth century, so every copy in existence is far younger than the script, and the script is far younger than the words it carries. The gap between composition and writing is the central fact about this alphabet. It records with great care a language nobody had spoken for centuries by the time the first pen was cut for it.
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 PositionEleventh of the thirty-eight consonant letters of the Avestan alphabet, which are ordered by where in the mouth the sound is made 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 SoundVoiceless dental fricative, the sound English spells th in thin 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 voiceless dental fricative it writes, the, following the same convention rather than an inherited word. 1 Sense of the Namethe th of thin, a voiceless dental fricative 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+10B1A AVESTAN LETTER THE 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 The: The Letter in the Avestan Alphabet
The sound is a voiceless dental fricative, the tongue tip near the teeth and the air passing through, which English spells th in thin. It is the fricative that answers to the plain t beside it. The dental letters follow the palatals. Five signs are given to this region, the two stops, the two fricatives that answer to them and a further sign restricted to certain positions, which is a larger provision than any neighbouring script of the period made for the same part of the mouth. It stands twenty-seventh in the alphabet as a whole and eleventh of the thirty-eight consonants, between Avestan Te and Avestan De. 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. Fifty-four letters is a large inventory by any standard and larger than any script in use around it. The number is less a measure of the language's complexity than of how much of the recitation the compilers decided the page ought to carry.
Avestan The and the Two Sounds English Spells Alike
English spells the two th sounds with the same pair of letters and lets a reader work out which is meant. Avestan gives them separate signs, which is the difference between a script that records a language and a script that records a performance of one. The shapes come from Pahlavi and the inventory does not. Whoever assembled this alphabet worked from an analysis of the recitation, added signs where the parent hand had none, and ordered the result by place of articulation instead of by the letter sequence that lay behind everything else written in Iran at the time.
Modern editions preserve the distinctions the manuscripts make, including the ones that look redundant, and transliterate them with accents, dots and length marks so that nothing collapses on the page. The apparatus of marks in a scholarly Avestan text is a direct consequence of how many separate signs the alphabet carries. In the digital record the letter is encoded at U+10B1A AVESTAN LETTER THE. 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. The practical test of the alphabet is whether a reciter reading from it produces what the tradition received, and by that test the fineness of its distinctions is not ornament. Each of the signs that looks redundant from outside answers to something a reciter kept apart.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Related To
The voiceless and voiced dental fricatives, which English writes with the same two letters and leaves a reader to tell apart.
The voiced and voiceless dental fricatives, which English writes with the same two letters and leaves a reader to tell apart; Dhe is, per its own description, explicitly the voiced counterpart of The.
The dental stop and the dental fricative that answers to it, the sound English spells th in thin.
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