Avestan Me: The Letter in the Avestan Alphabet

The sound is a plain m, the lips closed and the air released through the nose. It closes the run of ordinary nasal letters. The nasal letters form a block of eight, running from the velar nasal at the back of the mouth to the bilabial at the lips, with the palatal and the positionally restricted signs among them. Eight signs for the nasals is an unusual provision, and it exists because the recitation distinguished all eight. It stands forty-first in the alphabet as a whole and twenty-fifth of the thirty-eight consonants, between Avestan Nne and Avestan Hme. 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. Fifty-four letters is a large inventory by any standard and larger than any script in use around it. The number is less a measure of the language's complexity than of how much of the recitation the compilers decided the page ought to carry. 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.