Alphabet Letters
Avestan Le 𐬮
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.
Le writes the l of Avestan, the second of the two liquids and much the rarer of them in the older texts. A script devised to record a fixed body of recitation still has to provide for every sound that recitation contains, however seldom it occurs, and several Avestan letters exist for sounds that appear in only a handful of words. The alphabet is a record of a text, not a general-purpose writing system. The tradition calls the script din dabireh, the religion writing. It serves the Avesta and little else, which is why its repertoire tracks the sounds of that language and no other. The encoded repertoire runs to fifty-four letters, sixteen vowels followed by thirty-eight consonants, a larger inventory than the neighbouring scripts of its region and period.
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 PositionThirty-first 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 SoundThe l of Avestan, much the rarer of the two liquids in the older texts 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 l sound it writes, le, following the same convention rather than an inherited word. 1 Sense of the Namethe sound l, a liquid 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+10B2E AVESTAN LETTER LE 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 Le: The Letter in the Avestan Alphabet
The sound is an l, made with the tongue tip against the teeth and the air passing along the sides of the tongue. In the older Avestan language it is rare, and its place in the letter list says something about what the alphabet was expected to do besides write the oldest texts. The two liquids stand together after the glides. Their frequencies in the texts could hardly be more different, and the alphabet nonetheless provides for both on the same terms, a sign each and no comment on the disparity. It stands forty-seventh in the alphabet as a whole and thirty-first of the thirty-eight consonants, between Avestan Re and Avestan Se. 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. The alphabet is often described as one of the most phonetically exact writing systems of the ancient world. The description is fair, and the reason for it is narrow: the script had one job, and that job rewarded precision far more than it rewarded speed.
Avestan Le and the Later Use of the Script
The l is rare in the older Avestan language, and a letter list built from those texts alone would barely need it. The alphabet was later used to write Pazand, which is Middle Persian set down in Avestan letters, and there an l is wanted often. The shapes come from Pahlavi and the inventory does not. Whoever assembled this alphabet worked from an analysis of the recitation, added signs where the parent hand had none, and ordered the result by place of articulation instead of by the letter sequence that lay behind everything else written in Iran at the time.
Modern editions preserve the distinctions the manuscripts make, including the ones that look redundant, and transliterate them with accents, dots and length marks so that nothing collapses on the page. The apparatus of marks in a scholarly Avestan text is a direct consequence of how many separate signs the alphabet carries. In the digital record the letter is encoded at U+10B2E AVESTAN LETTER LE. 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. The practical test of the alphabet is whether a reciter reading from it produces what the tradition received, and by that test the fineness of its distinctions is not ornament. Each of the signs that looks redundant from outside answers to something a reciter kept apart.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Related To
The two liquid consonants of the alphabet. The r is common in the texts and the l is rare, and the script provides for both on the same terms.
The two liquid consonants of the alphabet. The r is common in the texts and the l is rare, and the script provides for both on the same terms.
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