Avestan Se and the Largest Family of Letters

The sibilants take six of the alphabet's thirty-eight consonant signs, more than any other family. The reason is that the recitation kept apart sounds a writing system built for correspondence would have merged without loss. A script made in the Sasanian period for a text composed a thousand years and more earlier is an act of preservation rather than of composition. Nothing was being written down for the first time. What was being done was the fixing, in a form that would not drift, of something priests already held in memory. The script was put to a second use as well.

Pazand is Middle Persian written in Avestan letters, taken up precisely because those letters record vowels and the Pahlavi ones did not, and it is the clearest practical demonstration of what the alphabet was good for. In the digital record the letter is encoded at U+10B2F AVESTAN LETTER SE. The block covers the letters together with a small set of punctuation marks used in the manuscripts. Standardising it settled, for digital purposes at least, a question the printed editions had answered in several different ways, which is how many letters the alphabet has. For the community the value of a script that writes every sound is continuity. It makes it possible to check a recitation against a page rather than against another reciter's memory, which is what the alphabet was for and what it still does.