Alphabet Letters
Avestan Fe 𐬟
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.
Fe writes a voiceless labial fricative, the sound English spells f, made where Pe is made but with the air allowed to escape. It is the voiceless half of the labial fricative pair. The Avestan letterforms descend, through Pahlavi and Parthian, from Aramaic; the arrangement into voiced and voiceless pairs by place of articulation is the contribution of the priests who made the alphabet. The gap between composition and writing is the central fact about this alphabet. It records with great care a language nobody had spoken for centuries by the time the first pen was cut for it. It was built on the Book Pahlavi hand, in which several sounds had come to share one shape. The Avestan alphabet takes that ambiguity apart, giving a separate sign to each sound the reciters kept distinct.
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 PositionSixteenth 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 labial fricative, the sound English spells f 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 labial fricative it writes, fe, following the same convention rather than an inherited word. 1 Sense of the Namethe sound f, a voiceless labial 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+10B1F AVESTAN LETTER FE 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 Fe: The Letter in the Avestan Alphabet
The sound is a voiceless labial fricative, the lips brought close so that the air passes through without a full closure. It is the fricative that answers to the p beside it, the same region of the mouth without the stop. Four letters serve the lips, and their arrangement repeats the pattern already set by the velars and the dentals. A stop and its fricative, then the voiced members of both. Read in order, the consonant section is an argument about how the sounds of the language are related to one another. It stands thirty-second in the alphabet as a whole and sixteenth of the thirty-eight consonants, between Avestan Pe and Avestan Be. 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. 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 Fe and the Softening of Stops
Fricatives arising from stops are a regular feature of the Avestan sound system, and the alphabet writes each of them separately from the stop it came from. A script that wrote only the stop would leave a reciter to reconstruct the softening. The shapes come from Pahlavi and the inventory does not. Whoever assembled this alphabet worked from an analysis of the recitation, added signs where the parent hand had none, and ordered the result by place of articulation instead of by the letter sequence that lay behind everything else written in Iran at the time.
Modern editions preserve the distinctions the manuscripts make, including the ones that look redundant, and transliterate them with accents, dots and length marks so that nothing collapses on the page. The apparatus of marks in a scholarly Avestan text is a direct consequence of how many separate signs the alphabet carries. In the digital record the letter is encoded at U+10B1F AVESTAN LETTER FE. 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 voiceless and voiced labial fricatives.
The voiced and voiceless labial fricatives, the same near-closure of the lips with the vocal folds running or still.
The bilabial stop and the labial fricative that answers to it, the same region of the mouth with and without a closure.
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