Avestan Ge: The Letter in the Avestan Alphabet

The sound is a plain g, the same closure at the soft palate as k but with the vocal folds vibrating. Voicing is the only difference between the two, and the alphabet gives each its own letter without hesitation. The velar letters stand at the head of the consonant section. The alphabet orders its consonants by where in the mouth the sound is made, beginning at the soft palate and working forward, so the k, the fricatives that go with it and the voiced sounds that answer to them all fall together at the start.

Within the series the plain sound comes first and the modified ones follow. It stands twenty-first in the alphabet as a whole and fifth of the thirty-eight consonants, between Avestan Xve and Avestan Gge. 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.