Alphabet Letters
Avestan Ao 𐬂
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.
Ao writes a rounded open vowel that editors transliterate as an a with a ring above it. It is neither the plain a nor the o, and the script gives it a sign of its own precisely because a reciter distinguished it from both. Signs of this kind are why the Avestan alphabet is so much larger than the writing systems around it: rather than let one letter cover a range of related sounds, it separates each shade the recitation kept apart. 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. 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.
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 PositionThird 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 SoundA rounded open vowel, transliterated as an a with a ring above, distinct from both the plain a and the 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 rounded open vowel it writes, ao, following the same transliteration convention rather than an inherited word. 1 Sense of the Namea rounded open vowel, transliterated a with a ring above 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+10B02 AVESTAN LETTER AO 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 Ao: The Letter in the Avestan Alphabet
The sound here is an open vowel produced with the lips rounded, which editors render as an a with a small ring set above it. It is not the plain a, because the lips are involved, and it is not the o, because the tongue stays low. 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 third in the alphabet as a whole and third of the sixteen vowel letters, between Avestan Aa and Avestan Aao. 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. The people who drew up this alphabet were not recording a language they spoke. Avestan had ceased to be anybody's mother tongue centuries before, and what they had in front of them was a recitation preserved by priests who had learned it by ear. The letters record that recitation, sound by sound, at the level of detail the reciters maintained. 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.
Avestan Ao and the Refusal to Merge Two Sounds
A rounded open vowel is exactly the kind of sound an ordinary chancery hand would fold into a neighbouring letter. This alphabet does not, and the refusal costs it a sign it could have done without if writing had been its only purpose. 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+10B02 AVESTAN LETTER AO. 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. 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.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Related To
The short and long rounded open vowel, the second of the eight vowel pairs and a distinction most writing systems of the region did not record.
The long and short rounded open vowel, the second of the eight vowel pairs and a distinction most writing systems of the region did not record.
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