Alphabet Letters
Avestan Xe 𐬑
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.
Xe writes a voiceless velar fricative, the sound of ch in the Scottish loch, made where Ke is made but with the air allowed through rather than stopped. Avestan distinguishes it not only from the stop but from two further fricatives of the same region that follow it in the alphabet, one palatalised and one rounded. Three signs where a simpler script would use one is characteristic of this alphabet throughout. 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 PositionSecond 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 SoundVoiceless velar fricative, the sound of ch in the Scottish loch 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 voiceless velar fricative it writes, xe, following the same convention rather than an inherited word. 1 Sense of the Namethe sound kh, a voiceless velar 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+10B11 AVESTAN LETTER XE 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 Xe: The Letter in the Avestan Alphabet
The sound is a voiceless velar fricative, the tongue brought close to the soft palate but not closing against it, so that the air rasps through. English has no such sound; Scottish loch and German Bach do. Seven signs are given to the velar region, which is more than any neighbouring script of the period provided for the same part of the mouth. The series carries a plain stop and a plain fricative, voiced counterparts for both, and palatalised and rounded forms besides, so that a reciter is never left to infer which of them a word calls for. It stands eighteenth in the alphabet as a whole and second of the thirty-eight consonants, between Avestan Ke and Avestan Xye. 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. Avestan is written from right to left, a direction inherited along with the letterforms. What was not inherited is the practice of writing every vowel, and that single departure is what makes the script legible to somebody who does not already know the word in front of them.
Avestan Xe and the Ambiguities of Book Pahlavi
Book Pahlavi had let a number of originally distinct sounds converge on shared shapes, and the velar fricatives were among the casualties. Undoing that convergence is the practical job the Avestan alphabet was made to do. A script made in the Sasanian period for a text composed a thousand years and more earlier is an act of preservation rather than of composition. Nothing was being written down for the first time. What was being done was the fixing, in a form that would not drift, of something priests already held in memory. The script was put to a second use as well.
Pazand is Middle Persian written in Avestan letters, taken up precisely because those letters record vowels and the Pahlavi ones did not, and it is the clearest practical demonstration of what the alphabet was good for. In the digital record the letter is encoded at U+10B11 AVESTAN LETTER XE. 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 voiceless and voiced velar fricatives, the same rasp at the soft palate with the vocal folds still or running.
The voiced and voiceless velar fricatives, the same rasp at the soft palate with the vocal folds running or still; Ghe is, per its own description, explicitly the voiced counterpart of Xe.
The velar stop and the velar fricative that answers to it, made in the same place with and without a full closure.
The plain velar fricative and its rounded counterpart, the second pronounced with the lips brought together.
The plain velar fricative and its palatalised counterpart, the second coloured by a glide towards the hard palate.
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