Avestan Tte: The Letter in the Avestan Alphabet

This is a second sign for t, transliterated with a mark set beneath. It does not compete with the plain letter across the language: it appears in particular positions and not freely, and the manuscripts are consistent about where each of the two belongs. 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 thirtieth in the alphabet as a whole and fourteenth of the thirty-eight consonants, between Avestan Dhe and Avestan Pe. 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. Nothing about this letter was forced by the writing it came from.

The shapes are Pahlavi, but the inventory, the ordering and the decision to write vowels in full are the work of whoever assembled the alphabet, and they are decisions taken about a text rather than about a language. Transliteration is where the size of the letter list becomes visible to a reader who does not know the script. A scholarly edition carries accents, dots, rings and length marks, and every one of those marks stands in for a separate Avestan letter that the Roman alphabet has no room for.