Avestan Ii and the Words That Turn on Length

A long i differs from a short one in duration alone, and Avestan words turn on that difference. The alphabet therefore writes it, in the same way and with the same consistency as it writes the other seven length distinctions. The gap between the words and the writing is the central fact about this alphabet, and it runs in both directions. The Avesta is far older than the script, and every surviving manuscript is far younger, so the script sits between two long stretches of transmission and belongs wholly to neither.

The Zoroastrian communities that carried these manuscripts, in Iran and in western India, are small, and the copying was sustained by priestly families rather than by any large institution. That the texts survive at all is a consequence of that continuity. In the digital record the letter is encoded at U+10B0D AVESTAN LETTER II. The Avestan block sits wholly in the supplementary planes, and every letter in it takes four bytes in the encoding most of the web runs on. That is the practical reason Avestan text is still uncommon online, and why a page carrying it depends on the reader having a font that covers the range. What this alphabet holds is a performance. The atlas describes it and does not instruct in it: the recitation belongs to the community that maintains it, and the interest here is in what the script was built to do and how well it did it.