Avestan Xye: The Letter in the Avestan Alphabet

This letter writes the velar fricative coloured by a glide towards the hard palate, so that the rasp carries a y like quality through it. Editors transliterate it with an accent set over the letter used for the plain fricative. The velar letters stand at the head of the consonant section. The alphabet orders its consonants by where in the mouth the sound is made, beginning at the soft palate and working forward, so the k, the fricatives that go with it and the voiced sounds that answer to them all fall together at the start.

Within the series the plain sound comes first and the modified ones follow. It stands nineteenth in the alphabet as a whole and third of the thirty-eight consonants, between Avestan Xe and Avestan Xve. The order is the work of the people who devised the alphabet rather than an inheritance from anywhere, and reading the list straight through recovers the analysis they were working from. The Avestan alphabet was made for one text. That is unusual, and it explains a repertoire far larger than the languages around it needed. A script serving letters, accounts and contracts can afford to let two sounds share a shape, because context recovers the sense. A script serving a recitation cannot, because there the sound is the thing being preserved.