Avestan She: The Letter in the Avestan Alphabet

The sound is a voiceless palato-alveolar sibilant, which English spells sh. The tongue is drawn a little further back than for s and the channel it makes is wider. Six sibilant letters is the alphabet's most conspicuous extravagance and its best argument. Four of the six write sounds in the sh region that most writing systems gather under a single sign, and the manuscripts are consistent about which of the four a given word takes. It stands fiftieth in the alphabet as a whole and thirty-fourth of the thirty-eight consonants, between Avestan Ze and Avestan Zhe. That position is not arbitrary. The sequence follows a scheme, vowels before consonants and consonants by place of articulation, and each letter's place in it is a statement about the sound.

Zoroastrian worship treats the correct sounding of the Avesta as part of the act itself. A priest is expected to produce the words as they have been received, and a sign that could stand for either of two sounds would put that in doubt. The size of this letter list follows from the requirement and not from any love of complication. One sign to one sound is the rule this alphabet works to, and it is easier to state than to keep. Most scripts break it somewhere, usually where a sound is rare enough that no scribe could be bothered, and the interest of this one lies in how few exceptions it allows itself.