Avestan He: The Letter in the Avestan Alphabet

The sound is a plain h, made in the throat with no obstruction anywhere in the mouth. It stands last in the alphabet, the fifty-fourth letter and the thirty-eighth of the consonants. The glottal fricative stands last. The ordering by place of articulation has run through the stops from the back of the mouth to the lips, then gathered the nasals, the glides, the liquids and the sibilants, and this letter closes the list at fifty-four. It stands fifty-fourth in the alphabet as a whole and thirty-eighth of the thirty-eight consonants, after Avestan Sshe and at the end of the list. 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. The alphabet is often described as one of the most phonetically exact writing systems of the ancient world. The description is fair, and the reason for it is narrow: the script had one job, and that job rewarded precision far more than it rewarded speed.