Avestan Gge 𐬕

This is the middle sign of the three the alphabet devotes to the voiced velar series, standing between the full stop and the fricative. Editors transliterate it with a dot to keep it apart from the other two. 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 twenty-second in the alphabet as a whole and sixth of the thirty-eight consonants, between Avestan Ge and Avestan Ghe. The order is the work of the people who devised the alphabet rather than an inheritance from anywhere, and reading the list straight through recovers the analysis they were working from.

Comparison makes the point quickly. Book Pahlavi, the hand this alphabet was drawn from, had let so many sounds converge on shared shapes that reading it depends heavily on already knowing the word. The Avestan alphabet takes that apart and assigns one sign to each sound, which is why it needs fifty-four of them. One sign to one sound is the rule this alphabet works to, and it is easier to state than to keep. Most scripts break it somewhere, usually where a sound is rare enough that no scribe could be bothered, and the interest of this one lies in how few exceptions it allows itself.

Three signs for one voiced velar series is a larger provision than any neighbouring script made, and modern editors have had to devise transliteration marks to keep them apart on the page. The distinctions are the manuscripts', not the editors'. 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+10B15 AVESTAN LETTER GGE. The whole Avestan block lies above the Basic Multilingual Plane, so each character needs a surrogate pair in the encodings that use them, and a font carrying the script is required before anything appears on a screen at all. 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.