Avestan Ke and the Ordering of the Consonants

The consonant section opens at the back of the mouth and works forward, an ordering derived from an analysis of how sounds are made rather than from any inherited letter sequence. The Aramaic order that lies behind so much of what was written in the region has been set aside entirely. The shapes come from Pahlavi and the inventory does not. Whoever assembled this alphabet worked from an analysis of the recitation, added signs where the parent hand had none, and ordered the result by place of articulation instead of by the letter sequence that lay behind everything else written in Iran at the time.

Modern editions preserve the distinctions the manuscripts make, including the ones that look redundant, and transliterate them with accents, dots and length marks so that nothing collapses on the page. The apparatus of marks in a scholarly Avestan text is a direct consequence of how many separate signs the alphabet carries. In the digital record the letter is encoded at U+10B10 AVESTAN LETTER KE. 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. Zoroastrianism is a living religion with a small community, and the Avesta is its liturgy rather than its archive. The letters of this alphabet are therefore not an antiquarian matter. They record sounds a priest is still expected to produce.