Alphabet Letters
Avestan Tte 𐬝
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.
Tte is a second sign for t, transliterated with a mark beneath the letter and used in restricted positions rather than freely. It closes the dental group. A script that gives a second letter to one consonant is recording something about where and how that consonant was spoken, and the Avestan alphabet does this more than once, always for a distinction the reciters made and the manuscripts preserve. 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. The script was designed for a single text, and its unusual fineness of distinction follows from that. In Zoroastrian worship the sound of the recited word is itself the offering, so a sign that could stand for two sounds would be a defect.
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 PositionFourteenth 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 SoundA second sign for t, transliterated with a mark beneath and used in restricted positions rather than freely 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 second t sign it writes, tte, marked with a beneath-letter diacritic in transliteration, following the same convention rather than an inherited word. 1 Sense of the Namea second t sign, used in restricted positions 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+10B1D AVESTAN LETTER TTE 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 Tte: The Letter in the Avestan Alphabet
This is a second sign for t, transliterated with a mark set beneath. It does not compete with the plain letter across the language: it appears in particular positions and not freely, and the manuscripts are consistent about where each of the two belongs. The dentals are the largest of the stop groups in this alphabet. Their five signs cover a voiced and a voiceless stop, a voiced and a voiceless fricative, and one sign whose use is governed by where in a word it falls rather than by a sound of its own. It stands thirtieth in the alphabet as a whole and fourteenth of the thirty-eight consonants, between Avestan Dhe and Avestan Pe. 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. Transliteration is where the size of the letter list becomes visible to a reader who does not know the script. A scholarly edition carries accents, dots, rings and length marks, and every one of those marks stands in for a separate Avestan letter that the Roman alphabet has no room for.
Avestan Tte and the Signs That Answer to Position
A second sign for a sound the alphabet already has is not redundancy. It marks a positional distinction the manuscripts observe, and modern editions reproduce it because the copies are consistent about it. Vowel writing is the innovation that separates this alphabet from everything else written in Iran at the time. The letterforms are Pahlavi and the right to left direction is Pahlavi. The vowels are not: they are full letters, and they come first in the order.
No Avestan manuscript survives from earlier than the thirteenth century of the common era. Every copy in existence is therefore many centuries younger than the alphabet, and the alphabet is many centuries younger again than the words. What reaches a modern edition has passed through both gaps. In the digital record the letter is encoded at U+10B1D AVESTAN LETTER TTE. 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. What this alphabet holds is a performance. The atlas describes it and does not instruct in it: the recitation belongs to the community that maintains it, and the interest here is in what the script was built to do and how well it did it.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Related To
The plain t and the second t sign, which belongs to particular positions rather than to the language at large.
The second t sign and the plain t it belongs beside; the second sign marks a conditioned articulation in restricted positions rather than a separate sound of the language at large.
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