Avestan Ao: The Letter in the Avestan Alphabet

The sound here is an open vowel produced with the lips rounded, which editors render as an a with a small ring set above it. It is not the plain a, because the lips are involved, and it is not the o, because the tongue stays low. 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 third in the alphabet as a whole and third of the sixteen vowel letters, between Avestan Aa and Avestan Aao. 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. The people who drew up this alphabet were not recording a language they spoke. Avestan had ceased to be anybody's mother tongue centuries before, and what they had in front of them was a recitation preserved by priests who had learned it by ear. The letters record that recitation, sound by sound, at the level of detail the reciters maintained. A reciter using this alphabet is not being taught the text. The priesthood that used it already knew the Avesta by heart, and the page served as a check on memory rather than as a substitute for it, which is why the script records fine detail a learner would never need.