Avestan Re: The Letter in the Avestan Alphabet

The sound is the r of Avestan, a liquid consonant made with the tongue tip. It is the commoner of the two liquids by a wide margin. The two liquids stand together after the glides. Their frequencies in the texts could hardly be more different, and the alphabet nonetheless provides for both on the same terms, a sign each and no comment on the disparity. It stands forty-sixth in the alphabet as a whole and thirtieth of the thirty-eight consonants, between Avestan Ve and Avestan Le. 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.

Comparison makes the point quickly. Book Pahlavi, the hand this alphabet was drawn from, had let so many sounds converge on shared shapes that reading it depends heavily on already knowing the word. The Avestan alphabet takes that apart and assigns one sign to each sound, which is why it needs fifty-four of them. 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.