Avestan Ve: The Letter in the Avestan Alphabet

The sound is the labial glide, made at the lips as its palatal counterpart is made at the palate. Editors transliterate it v, though the articulation is nearer the w of English than the v of the modern European languages. The glides follow the nasals in the sequence. They are the sounds made with the least obstruction of any in the alphabet, and three signs are given to them, two for the palatal glide and one for the labial. It stands forty-fifth in the alphabet as a whole and twenty-ninth of the thirty-eight consonants, between Avestan Ye and Avestan Re. 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. 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.