Avestan Pe 𐬞

The sound is a plain p, made by closing the lips and releasing them. It opens the labial group, the ordering having worked steadily forward from the soft palate towards the front of the mouth. The labial letters come after the dentals, the ordering having worked steadily forward from the soft palate to the lips. Four signs cover the region: the two stops and the two fricatives that answer to them, voiceless before voiced in each pair. It stands thirty-first in the alphabet as a whole and fifteenth of the thirty-eight consonants, between Avestan Tte and Avestan Fe.

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. A reciter using this alphabet is not being taught the text. The priesthood that used it already knew the Avesta by heart, and the page served as a check on memory rather than as a substitute for it, which is why the script records fine detail a learner would never need.

The labial letters sit where the phonetic ordering puts them, at the front of the mouth and so late in the consonant sequence. That arrangement is the clearest surviving statement of how the script's makers analysed the language. 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+10B1E AVESTAN LETTER PE. 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. 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.