Alphabet Letters
Avestan Dhe 𐬜
Avestan Letters
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Origin Devised in the Sasanian period, commonly placed in the fifth or sixth century CE, long after the Avestan texts themselves were composed.
Dhe writes a voiced dental fricative, the sound English spells th in this, and is the voiced counterpart of The. With it the four-way dental scheme is complete: stop and fricative, voiceless and voiced. That symmetry is not an accident of the letterforms, which come from the Pahlavi hand, but of the phonetic analysis the designers imposed on them when they arranged the alphabet. Avestan is written right to left, and its vowels are full letters standing in the line rather than marks hung on a consonant. That is the clearest break the script makes with the Pahlavi writing behind it. The Avesta was composed long before any script existed to hold it, and priests carried it in memory. This alphabet was made in Sasanian Iran, centuries later, to fix in writing what recitation had already preserved.
Facts
Identity
Script TypeAn alphabet in the strict sense: its vowels are full letters standing in the line, not marks hung on a consonant, which is the sharpest break it makes with the Book Pahlavi writing it was drawn from. 1Tradition: The Avestan script PositionThirteenth of the thirty-eight consonant letters of the Avestan alphabet, which are ordered by where in the mouth the sound is made 2Tradition: The Avestan script How the Letter JoinsWritten right to left, with each sound kept to its own distinct sign. The Book Pahlavi hand behind it had let several sounds fall together into shared shapes, and undoing that ambiguity is what the Avestan alphabet was made for. 1Tradition: The Avestan script Attributions
Associated SoundVoiced dental fricative, the sound English spells th in this 1Tradition: Avestan phonology Origins
Origin PeriodDevised in the Sasanian period, commonly placed in the fifth or sixth century CE, long after the Avestan texts themselves were composed. 1Tradition: The Avestan script Place of OriginSasanian Iran, where the Zoroastrian priesthood assembled the written Avesta. 1Tradition: The Avestan script Origin of the NameNamed directly for the voiced dental fricative it writes, dhe, following the same convention rather than an inherited word. 1 Sense of the Namethe th of this, a voiced dental fricative 1Tradition: The Avestan script Transmission
Manuscript TraditionNo Avestan manuscript survives from earlier than the thirteenth century CE, so every witness to the script is many centuries younger than the script itself, and the script is younger again than the words it carries. 4Tradition: Zoroastrianism Practice
Liturgical and Scriptural RoleThe script exists to fix the sound of the Avesta, which is recited in Zoroastrian worship, a living practice with a small community. Its precision serves the requirement that the recited word be pronounced as it has been received. 3Tradition: Zoroastrianism Attestation
Meaning in the Attesting SourceEncoded at U+10B1C AVESTAN LETTER DHE in the Avestan block, which lies wholly above the Basic Multilingual Plane. 2Tradition: The Avestan script Meaning in the Attesting SourceThe Avesta was transmitted orally by priests for centuries before any script existed to hold it. This alphabet records a recitation, not a composition, and the gap between the two is the central fact about it. 4Tradition: Zoroastrianism Learn More
Avestan Dhe: The Letter in the Avestan Alphabet
The sound is a voiced dental fricative, which English spells th in this. English writes the voiced and voiceless members of that pair with the same two letters and leaves a reader to work out which is meant; Avestan gives each its own sign. The dental letters follow the palatals. Five signs are given to this region, the two stops, the two fricatives that answer to them and a further sign restricted to certain positions, which is a larger provision than any neighbouring script of the period made for the same part of the mouth. It stands twenty-ninth in the alphabet as a whole and thirteenth of the thirty-eight consonants, between Avestan De and Avestan Tte. 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. The tradition calls the script din dabireh, the religion writing. It served the Avesta and very little else, and the shape of its letter list follows the sounds of that one language rather than any general requirement of writing in Sasanian Iran. One sign to one sound is the rule this alphabet works to, and it is easier to state than to keep. Most scripts break it somewhere, usually where a sound is rare enough that no scribe could be bothered, and the interest of this one lies in how few exceptions it allows itself.
Avestan Dhe and Writing What Is Heard
A voiced dental fricative arises in Avestan where a stop has softened between vowels, and the script writes the result rather than the form it came from. That choice, writing what is heard rather than what is expected, runs through the whole alphabet. The gap between the words and the writing is the central fact about this alphabet, and it runs in both directions. The Avesta is far older than the script, and every surviving manuscript is far younger, so the script sits between two long stretches of transmission and belongs wholly to neither.
The Zoroastrian communities that carried these manuscripts, in Iran and in western India, are small, and the copying was sustained by priestly families rather than by any large institution. That the texts survive at all is a consequence of that continuity. In the digital record the letter is encoded at U+10B1C AVESTAN LETTER DHE. The Avestan block sits wholly in the supplementary planes, and every letter in it takes four bytes in the encoding most of the web runs on. That is the practical reason Avestan text is still uncommon online, and why a page carrying it depends on the reader having a font that covers the range. 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.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Related To
The voiced dental stop and the voiced dental fricative, the sound English spells th in this.
The voiceless and voiced dental fricatives, which English writes with the same two letters and leaves a reader to tell apart.
The voiced and voiceless dental fricatives, which English writes with the same two letters and leaves a reader to tell apart; Dhe is, per its own description, explicitly the voiced counterpart of The.
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