Avestan Pe: The Letter in the Avestan Alphabet

The sound is a plain p, made by closing the lips and releasing them. It opens the labial group, the ordering having worked steadily forward from the soft palate towards the front of the mouth. The labial letters come after the dentals, the ordering having worked steadily forward from the soft palate to the lips. Four signs cover the region: the two stops and the two fricatives that answer to them, voiceless before voiced in each pair. It stands thirty-first in the alphabet as a whole and fifteenth of the thirty-eight consonants, between Avestan Tte and Avestan Fe.

The order is the work of the people who devised the alphabet rather than an inheritance from anywhere, and reading the list straight through recovers the analysis they were working from. The Avestan alphabet was made for one text. That is unusual, and it explains a repertoire far larger than the languages around it needed. A script serving letters, accounts and contracts can afford to let two sounds share a shape, because context recovers the sense. A script serving a recitation cannot, because there the sound is the thing being preserved. A reciter using this alphabet is not being taught the text. The priesthood that used it already knew the Avesta by heart, and the page served as a check on memory rather than as a substitute for it, which is why the script records fine detail a learner would never need.