Avestan Oo: The Letter in the Avestan Alphabet

This letter writes the long back o. Its short partner stands immediately before it, and the two together make the sixth of the eight short and long pairs into which the vowel section falls. Writing a vowel as a full letter costs space and time, and every scribe who ever worked in a Semitic hand had reasons not to do it. This alphabet does it sixteen times over, which is a fair indication that legibility for a reader who already knew the words was not the goal. Reproducibility of a sound was. It stands twelfth in the alphabet as a whole and twelfth of the sixteen vowel letters, between Avestan O and Avestan I. 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. 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.