Avestan Ae and the Vowel Most Scripts Leave Out

The reduced central vowel is the sound most likely to go unwritten in any script that does not write vowels in full. Avestan writes it out, and because it is so frequent that one decision changes the whole look of the page. 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+10B06 AVESTAN LETTER AE. 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.