Avestan Be and the Value of Completeness

A plain b is provided for as carefully as the rarest sound in the alphabet. The completeness is what makes the script usable for its one purpose, because nothing in the recitation is left without a sign. A script made in the Sasanian period for a text composed a thousand years and more earlier is an act of preservation rather than of composition. Nothing was being written down for the first time. What was being done was the fixing, in a form that would not drift, of something priests already held in memory. The script was put to a second use as well.

Pazand is Middle Persian written in Avestan letters, taken up precisely because those letters record vowels and the Pahlavi ones did not, and it is the clearest practical demonstration of what the alphabet was good for. In the digital record the letter is encoded at U+10B20 AVESTAN LETTER BE. 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. 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.