Avestan Ye: The Letter in the Avestan Alphabet

The sound is the palatal glide, the tongue moving towards the hard palate without ever obstructing the air, which English spells y at the start of a word. 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-fourth in the alphabet as a whole and twenty-eighth of the thirty-eight consonants, between Avestan Yye and Avestan Ve. That position is not arbitrary. The sequence follows a scheme, vowels before consonants and consonants by place of articulation, and each letter's place in it is a statement about the sound.

Zoroastrian worship treats the correct sounding of the Avesta as part of the act itself. A priest is expected to produce the words as they have been received, and a sign that could stand for either of two sounds would put that in doubt. The size of this letter list follows from the requirement and not from any love of complication. 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.