Avestan A: The Letter in the Avestan Alphabet

The sound this letter writes is a short open a, made with the tongue low and the mouth unconstricted, and it is the vowel that occurs most often in the Avestan texts. A reciter produces it briefly, and the brevity is the whole of the difference, because the alphabet also carries a separate sign for the same vowel held long. Every vowel in this alphabet is a letter in its own right, standing on the line and taking its turn between the consonants. That is not how the writing it grew out of worked, where a reader supplied much of the vowelling from knowledge of the word, and it is not how the Indic scripts of the same centuries worked either, where vowels hung as marks above and below a consonant sign.

Avestan writes them out. It stands first in the alphabet as a whole and first of the sixteen vowel letters, at the head of the list and before Avestan Aa. 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.