Alphabet Letters
Avestan Oo 𐬋
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.
Oo writes the long rounded back vowel, the held counterpart of O. It completes the third short and long pair of the vowel section. The Avestan vowel letters, sixteen of them, outnumber the vowel resources of every neighbouring script of the period, and that surplus exists for one reason: the alphabet was made to preserve a recitation whose value lay in being reproduced exactly. 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. Zoroastrianism is a small living religion and the Avesta is its liturgy, recited in worship now. These letters are not an antiquarian matter; they record sounds a priest is still expected to produce.
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 PositionTwelfth of the sixteen vowel letters of the Avestan alphabet, which are set out in pairs of short and long before the consonants begin 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 SoundLong rounded back o 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 long rounded back vowel it writes, oo, the held partner of O, following the same convention rather than an inherited word. 1 Sense of the Namethe long vowel o 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+10B0B AVESTAN LETTER OO 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 Oo: The Letter in the Avestan Alphabet
This letter writes the long back o. Its short partner stands immediately before it, and the two together make the sixth of the eight short and long pairs into which the vowel section falls. Writing a vowel as a full letter costs space and time, and every scribe who ever worked in a Semitic hand had reasons not to do it. This alphabet does it sixteen times over, which is a fair indication that legibility for a reader who already knew the words was not the goal. Reproducibility of a sound was. It stands twelfth in the alphabet as a whole and twelfth of the sixteen vowel letters, between Avestan O and Avestan I. Nothing in that placement was handed down. The sequence was arranged by whoever assembled the alphabet, and it records their view of how the sounds of the language stand in relation to one another. Nothing about this letter was forced by the writing it came from.
The shapes are Pahlavi, but the inventory, the ordering and the decision to write vowels in full are the work of whoever assembled the alphabet, and they are decisions taken about a text rather than about a language. 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 Oo and the Policy Behind the Pairs
The long back o completes a pair, and the pairing is the structural fact worth noticing. Vowel length is written eight times over in this alphabet, in every quality it distinguishes, which is a policy rather than a run of separate choices. 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+10B0B AVESTAN LETTER OO. The block covers the letters together with a small set of punctuation marks used in the manuscripts. Standardising it settled, for digital purposes at least, a question the printed editions had answered in several different ways, which is how many letters the alphabet has. For the community the value of a script that writes every sound is continuity. It makes it possible to check a recitation against a page rather than against another reciter's memory, which is what the alphabet was for and what it still does.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Related To
The short and long back o, the pair that follows the front vowels in the sequence.
The long and short back o, the pair that follows the front vowels in the sequence.
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