Avestan Ze: The Letter in the Avestan Alphabet

The sound is a plain z, the same channelling of air as s with the vocal folds running. The sibilants close the consonant section before the final letter, and they are the largest family in the alphabet: six signs, where the scripts around it managed with two or three. The group runs from the plain s and z through the sh sounds, of which there are four. It stands forty-ninth in the alphabet as a whole and thirty-third of the thirty-eight consonants, between Avestan Se and Avestan She. 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. Whoever devised the alphabet is not recorded. The script can be dated and placed with reasonable confidence, but no source names the person or the group responsible, and the atlas records that absence rather than filling it.