Avestan Ngye: The Letter in the Avestan Alphabet

This letter writes the velar nasal coloured by a glide towards the hard palate. It stands to the plain nasal exactly as the palatalised fricative earlier in the alphabet stands to the plain fricative, and the parallel is not an accident. The nasals are where the alphabet's habit of building in series is easiest to see. The velar nasal has palatalised and rounded partners exactly as the velar fricative does, and the dental nasal has a palatal partner and a positionally restricted one, so the group is a small grid rather than a list. It stands thirty-sixth in the alphabet as a whole and twentieth of the thirty-eight consonants, between Avestan Nge and Avestan Ngve. Nothing in that placement was handed down. The sequence was arranged by whoever assembled the alphabet, and it records their view of how the sounds of the language stand in relation to one another. Nothing about this letter was forced by the writing it came from.

The shapes are Pahlavi, but the inventory, the ordering and the decision to write vowels in full are the work of whoever assembled the alphabet, and they are decisions taken about a text rather than about a language. One sign to one sound is the rule this alphabet works to, and it is easier to state than to keep. Most scripts break it somewhere, usually where a sound is rare enough that no scribe could be bothered, and the interest of this one lies in how few exceptions it allows itself.