Avestan Ghe: The Letter in the Avestan Alphabet

The sound is a voiced velar fricative, made in the same place as the voiceless rasp beside it but with the vocal folds running. It is the sound a Spanish speaker produces in the middle of lago. 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-third in the alphabet as a whole and seventh of the thirty-eight consonants, between Avestan Gge and Avestan Ce. 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. The tradition calls the script din dabireh, the religion writing. It served the Avesta and very little else, and the shape of its letter list follows the sounds of that one language rather than any general requirement of writing in Sasanian Iran. Transliteration is where the size of the letter list becomes visible to a reader who does not know the script. A scholarly edition carries accents, dots, rings and length marks, and every one of those marks stands in for a separate Avestan letter that the Roman alphabet has no room for.