Avestan Yye 𐬪

This is one of the alphabet's two signs for the palatal glide, distinguished from the other by a dot in transliteration. Both write a y, and the manuscripts are consistent about which of them is used where. The glides follow the nasals in the sequence. They are the sounds made with the least obstruction of any in the alphabet, and three signs are given to them, two for the palatal glide and one for the labial. It stands forty-third in the alphabet as a whole and twenty-seventh of the thirty-eight consonants, between Avestan Hme and Avestan Ye. 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.

The Avestan alphabet was made for one text. That is unusual, and it explains a repertoire far larger than the languages around it needed. A script serving letters, accounts and contracts can afford to let two sounds share a shape, because context recovers the sense. A script serving a recitation cannot, because there the sound is the thing being preserved. 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.

Two signs for one glide is a distinction of position rather than of sound, and it is the kind of detail that only survives in a tradition copied with care. The manuscripts observe it consistently enough that editors reproduce it. 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+10B2A AVESTAN LETTER YYE. 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. 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.