Avestan The: The Letter in the Avestan Alphabet

The sound is a voiceless dental fricative, the tongue tip near the teeth and the air passing through, which English spells th in thin. It is the fricative that answers to the plain t beside it. The dental letters follow the palatals. Five signs are given to this region, the two stops, the two fricatives that answer to them and a further sign restricted to certain positions, which is a larger provision than any neighbouring script of the period made for the same part of the mouth. It stands twenty-seventh in the alphabet as a whole and eleventh of the thirty-eight consonants, between Avestan Te and Avestan De. Nothing in that placement was handed down.

The sequence was arranged by whoever assembled the alphabet, and it records their view of how the sounds of the language stand in relation to one another. The people who drew up this alphabet were not recording a language they spoke. Avestan had ceased to be anybody's mother tongue centuries before, and what they had in front of them was a recitation preserved by priests who had learned it by ear. The letters record that recitation, sound by sound, at the level of detail the reciters maintained. Fifty-four letters is a large inventory by any standard and larger than any script in use around it. The number is less a measure of the language's complexity than of how much of the recitation the compilers decided the page ought to carry.