Avestan Te: The Letter in the Avestan Alphabet

The sound is a plain t, made with the tongue tip against the upper teeth rather than the ridge behind them, which is the dental articulation the older Indo-Iranian languages share. The dentals are the largest of the stop groups in this alphabet. Their five signs cover a voiced and a voiceless stop, a voiced and a voiceless fricative, and one sign whose use is governed by where in a word it falls rather than by a sound of its own. It stands twenty-sixth in the alphabet as a whole and tenth of the thirty-eight consonants, between Avestan Je and Avestan The. 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. The alphabet is often described as one of the most phonetically exact writing systems of the ancient world. The description is fair, and the reason for it is narrow: the script had one job, and that job rewarded precision far more than it rewarded speed.