Avestan Fe: The Letter in the Avestan Alphabet

The sound is a voiceless labial fricative, the lips brought close so that the air passes through without a full closure. It is the fricative that answers to the p beside it, the same region of the mouth without the stop. 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-second in the alphabet as a whole and sixteenth of the thirty-eight consonants, between Avestan Pe and Avestan Be. That position is not arbitrary. The sequence follows a scheme, vowels before consonants and consonants by place of articulation, and each letter's place in it is a statement about the sound.

Zoroastrian worship treats the correct sounding of the Avesta as part of the act itself. A priest is expected to produce the words as they have been received, and a sign that could stand for either of two sounds would put that in doubt. The size of this letter list follows from the requirement and not from any love of complication. Avestan is written from right to left, a direction inherited along with the letterforms. What was not inherited is the practice of writing every vowel, and that single departure is what makes the script legible to somebody who does not already know the word in front of them.