Avestan Xe: The Letter in the Avestan Alphabet

The sound is a voiceless velar fricative, the tongue brought close to the soft palate but not closing against it, so that the air rasps through. English has no such sound; Scottish loch and German Bach do. Seven signs are given to the velar region, which is more than any neighbouring script of the period provided for the same part of the mouth. The series carries a plain stop and a plain fricative, voiced counterparts for both, and palatalised and rounded forms besides, so that a reciter is never left to infer which of them a word calls for. It stands eighteenth in the alphabet as a whole and second of the thirty-eight consonants, between Avestan Ke and Avestan Xye. 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. Avestan is written from right to left, a direction inherited along with the letterforms. What was not inherited is the practice of writing every vowel, and that single departure is what makes the script legible to somebody who does not already know the word in front of them.