Avestan Hme: The Letter in the Avestan Alphabet

This letter writes h and m together as a single sign, treating the sequence as one articulation rather than as two letters set side by side. A script that otherwise insists on one sign to one sound here makes an exception, and the exception is itself evidence about how the sequence was heard. The nasals are where the alphabet's habit of building in series is easiest to see. The velar nasal has palatalised and rounded partners exactly as the velar fricative does, and the dental nasal has a palatal partner and a positionally restricted one, so the group is a small grid rather than a list. It stands forty-second in the alphabet as a whole and twenty-sixth of the thirty-eight consonants, between Avestan Me and Avestan Yye. 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. 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.