Avestan Aan: The Letter in the Avestan Alphabet

This is the second of the two nasal a signs and much the rarer. It marks a nasalised vowel that the manuscripts keep apart from the one written by its neighbour, and editors preserve the distinction rather than reduce the pair to one. Writing a vowel as a full letter costs space and time, and every scribe who ever worked in a Semitic hand had reasons not to do it. This alphabet does it sixteen times over, which is a fair indication that legibility for a reader who already knew the words was not the goal. Reproducibility of a sound was. It stands sixth in the alphabet as a whole and sixth of the sixteen vowel letters, between Avestan An and Avestan Ae. 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. Nothing about this letter was forced by the writing it came from.

The shapes are Pahlavi, but the inventory, the ordering and the decision to write vowels in full are the work of whoever assembled the alphabet, and they are decisions taken about a text rather than about a language. 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.