Avestan Le: The Letter in the Avestan Alphabet

The sound is an l, made with the tongue tip against the teeth and the air passing along the sides of the tongue. In the older Avestan language it is rare, and its place in the letter list says something about what the alphabet was expected to do besides write the oldest texts. The two liquids stand together after the glides. Their frequencies in the texts could hardly be more different, and the alphabet nonetheless provides for both on the same terms, a sign each and no comment on the disparity. It stands forty-seventh in the alphabet as a whole and thirty-first of the thirty-eight consonants, between Avestan Re and Avestan Se. That position is not arbitrary.

The sequence follows a scheme, vowels before consonants and consonants by place of articulation, and each letter's place in it is a statement about the sound. The tradition calls the script din dabireh, the religion writing. It served the Avesta and very little else, and the shape of its letter list follows the sounds of that one language rather than any general requirement of writing in Sasanian Iran. 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.