Avestan Je: The Letter in the Avestan Alphabet

The sound is a voiced palatal affricate, the same articulation as its voiceless neighbour with the vocal folds running, which English spells j in judge. The two palatal affricates stand together in the sequence, voiceless before voiced, in the position the phonetic ordering assigns them between the velars and the dentals. Each is a single articulation rather than a cluster of two, and the alphabet writes each with a single letter, which is the treatment it gives to every sound it recognises. It stands twenty-fifth in the alphabet as a whole and ninth of the thirty-eight consonants, between Avestan Ce and Avestan Te. The order is the work of the people who devised the alphabet rather than an inheritance from anywhere, and reading the list straight through recovers the analysis they were working from.

The Avestan alphabet was made for one text. That is unusual, and it explains a repertoire far larger than the languages around it needed. A script serving letters, accounts and contracts can afford to let two sounds share a shape, because context recovers the sense. A script serving a recitation cannot, because there the sound is the thing being preserved. Avestan is written from right to left, a direction inherited along with the letterforms. What was not inherited is the practice of writing every vowel, and that single departure is what makes the script legible to somebody who does not already know the word in front of them.