Avestan Be: The Letter in the Avestan Alphabet

The sound is a plain b, the same closure of the lips as p with the vocal folds running. The labial letters come after the dentals, the ordering having worked steadily forward from the soft palate to the lips. Four signs cover the region: the two stops and the two fricatives that answer to them, voiceless before voiced in each pair. It stands thirty-third in the alphabet as a whole and seventeenth of the thirty-eight consonants, between Avestan Fe and Avestan Bhe. 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. The alphabet is often described as one of the most phonetically exact writing systems of the ancient world. The description is fair, and the reason for it is narrow: the script had one job, and that job rewarded precision far more than it rewarded speed.