Alphabet Letters
Avestan Xve 𐬓
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.
Xve writes the rounded counterpart of Xe, a velar fricative pronounced with the lips brought together so that a w-like colouring runs through it. Editors transliterate it with a small superscript v or w. The sound is familiar to readers of Zoroastrian scholarship from the word for the divine glory, which begins with it, and it has its own letter because the recitation kept it apart from the plain fricative. The order of the letters follows the phonetic analysis behind the script rather than an inherited Semitic sequence. The vowels come first, in short and long pairs, and the consonants follow by place of articulation. 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.
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 PositionFourth 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 rounded velar fricative, pronounced with the lips brought together so that a w-like colouring runs through it 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 rounded velar fricative it writes, xve, following the same convention rather than an inherited word. 1 Sense of the Namea rounded kh, written with lip rounding 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+10B13 AVESTAN LETTER XVE 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 Xve: The Letter in the Avestan Alphabet
The sound is the velar fricative pronounced with the lips brought together, so that a w like rounding runs through the whole articulation. Transliteration writes it as the plain fricative with a small raised v beside it. 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 twentieth in the alphabet as a whole and fourth of the thirty-eight consonants, between Avestan Xye and Avestan Ge. 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.
Zoroastrian worship treats the correct sounding of the Avesta as part of the act itself. A priest is expected to produce the words as they have been received, and a sign that could stand for either of two sounds would put that in doubt. The size of this letter list follows from the requirement and not from any love of complication. Fifty-four letters is a large inventory by any standard and larger than any script in use around it. The number is less a measure of the language's complexity than of how much of the recitation the compilers decided the page ought to carry.
Avestan Xve and the Case for Phonetic Care
The rounded velar fricative is one of the sounds most often pointed to when the phonetic care of this alphabet is described. It occupies a letter of its own rather than being written as a fricative followed by a glide. 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+10B13 AVESTAN LETTER XVE. 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. 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 rounded velar fricative and the rounded velar nasal, the second half of a symmetry that runs across two separate parts of the consonant list.
The plain velar fricative and its rounded counterpart, the second pronounced with the lips brought together.
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