Avestan Ce: The Letter in the Avestan Alphabet

The sound is a voiceless palatal affricate, a t and an sh run together as a single articulation, which English spells ch in church. It opens the palatal group of the alphabet. The two palatal affricates stand together in the sequence, voiceless before voiced, in the position the phonetic ordering assigns them between the velars and the dentals. Each is a single articulation rather than a cluster of two, and the alphabet writes each with a single letter, which is the treatment it gives to every sound it recognises. It stands twenty-fourth in the alphabet as a whole and eighth of the thirty-eight consonants, between Avestan Ghe and Avestan Je. 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. Nothing about this letter was forced by the writing it came from.

The shapes are Pahlavi, but the inventory, the ordering and the decision to write vowels in full are the work of whoever assembled the alphabet, and they are decisions taken about a text rather than about a language. 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.