Avestan A 𐬀

The sound this letter writes is a short open a, made with the tongue low and the mouth unconstricted, and it is the vowel that occurs most often in the Avestan texts. A reciter produces it briefly, and the brevity is the whole of the difference, because the alphabet also carries a separate sign for the same vowel held long. Every vowel in this alphabet is a letter in its own right, standing on the line and taking its turn between the consonants. That is not how the writing it grew out of worked, where a reader supplied much of the vowelling from knowledge of the word, and it is not how the Indic scripts of the same centuries worked either, where vowels hung as marks above and below a consonant sign.

Avestan writes them out. It stands first in the alphabet as a whole and first of the sixteen vowel letters, at the head of the list and before Avestan Aa. 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.

The letter that opens the alphabet also states its programme. Book Pahlavi, the writing from which these shapes were drawn, showed vowels only partially and left much for a reader to supply from knowledge of the word. That is workable for a document whose sense can be guessed at and useless for a text whose value lies in being sounded correctly. Book Pahlavi is the hand behind these letterforms, and the relationship between the two is one of correction. In that writing a number of originally distinct sounds had come to share a single shape, so reading it depends on recognising words rather than on assembling them from letters.

The Avestan alphabet takes the same pen strokes and separates what had merged. Because the surviving copies are late, the evidence for what any individual letter did rests on the consistency of the manuscript tradition rather than on early witnesses. Where the copies agree, editors follow them; where they do not, the disagreement is recorded rather than settled by preference. In the digital record the letter is encoded at U+10B00 AVESTAN LETTER A. The whole Avestan block lies above the Basic Multilingual Plane, so each character needs a surrogate pair in the encodings that use them, and a font carrying the script is required before anything appears on a screen at all. Zoroastrianism is a living religion with a small community, and the Avesta is its liturgy rather than its archive. The letters of this alphabet are therefore not an antiquarian matter. They record sounds a priest is still expected to produce.