Avestan Nye: The Letter in the Avestan Alphabet

The sound is a palatal nasal, the body of the tongue pressed against the hard palate, close to what Spanish writes with a tilde and French with gn. 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 thirty-ninth in the alphabet as a whole and twenty-third of the thirty-eight consonants, between Avestan Ne and Avestan Nne. 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. The people who drew up this alphabet were not recording a language they spoke. Avestan had ceased to be anybody's mother tongue centuries before, and what they had in front of them was a recitation preserved by priests who had learned it by ear. The letters record that recitation, sound by sound, at the level of detail the reciters maintained. 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.