Avestan An and What Recitation Preserves

Nasalisation is among the first things to go when a language is written down casually. It survives in careful recitation and disappears from careless spelling, and a script that writes it is telling you which of the two it was built for. Vowel writing is the innovation that separates this alphabet from everything else written in Iran at the time. The letterforms are Pahlavi and the right to left direction is Pahlavi. The vowels are not: they are full letters, and they come first in the order.

No Avestan manuscript survives from earlier than the thirteenth century of the common era. Every copy in existence is therefore many centuries younger than the alphabet, and the alphabet is many centuries younger again than the words. What reaches a modern edition has passed through both gaps. In the digital record the letter is encoded at U+10B04 AVESTAN LETTER AN. The Avestan block sits wholly in the supplementary planes, and every letter in it takes four bytes in the encoding most of the web runs on. That is the practical reason Avestan text is still uncommon online, and why a page carrying it depends on the reader having a font that covers the range. Zoroastrianism is a living religion with a small community, and the Avesta is its liturgy rather than its archive. The letters of this alphabet are therefore not an antiquarian matter. They record sounds a priest is still expected to produce.