Avestan Bhe: The Letter in the Avestan Alphabet

The sound is a voiced bilabial fricative, a b in which the lips approach one another without ever fully meeting, so that the sound continues instead of bursting. Spanish makes it in the middle of haber. Four letters serve the lips, and their arrangement repeats the pattern already set by the velars and the dentals. A stop and its fricative, then the voiced members of both. Read in order, the consonant section is an argument about how the sounds of the language are related to one another. It stands thirty-fourth in the alphabet as a whole and eighteenth of the thirty-eight consonants, between Avestan Be and Avestan Nge. The order is the work of the people who devised the alphabet rather than an inheritance from anywhere, and reading the list straight through recovers the analysis they were working from.

Comparison makes the point quickly. Book Pahlavi, the hand this alphabet was drawn from, had let so many sounds converge on shared shapes that reading it depends heavily on already knowing the word. The Avestan alphabet takes that apart and assigns one sign to each sound, which is why it needs fifty-four of them. Fifty-four letters is a large inventory by any standard and larger than any script in use around it. The number is less a measure of the language's complexity than of how much of the recitation the compilers decided the page ought to carry.