Avestan Aan and the Rarer of Two Signs

The rarer of the two nasal a signs is the sort of letter a later copyist might have been tempted to fold into the commoner one. The manuscripts do not fold it, and the scholarly editions follow the manuscripts. 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+10B05 AVESTAN LETTER AAN. 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. 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.