Avestan De: The Letter in the Avestan Alphabet

The sound is a plain d, the same dental closure as t with the vocal folds running. It is among the most ordinary sounds in the language and the alphabet gives it a letter as plain as itself. The dentals are the largest of the stop groups in this alphabet. Their five signs cover a voiced and a voiceless stop, a voiced and a voiceless fricative, and one sign whose use is governed by where in a word it falls rather than by a sound of its own. It stands twenty-eighth in the alphabet as a whole and twelfth of the thirty-eight consonants, between Avestan The and Avestan Dhe. 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. Whoever devised the alphabet is not recorded. The script can be dated and placed with reasonable confidence, but no source names the person or the group responsible, and the atlas records that absence rather than filling it.