Avestan Shye: The Letter in the Avestan Alphabet

This letter writes an sh coloured by a glide towards the hard palate, transliterated with an accent. It is the third of the alphabet's four sh type signs. 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 fifty-second in the alphabet as a whole and thirty-sixth of the thirty-eight consonants, between Avestan Zhe and Avestan Sshe. 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. 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.