Avestan Ghe 𐬖

The sound is a voiced velar fricative, made in the same place as the voiceless rasp beside it but with the vocal folds running. It is the sound a Spanish speaker produces in the middle of lago. The velar letters stand at the head of the consonant section. The alphabet orders its consonants by where in the mouth the sound is made, beginning at the soft palate and working forward, so the k, the fricatives that go with it and the voiced sounds that answer to them all fall together at the start.

Within the series the plain sound comes first and the modified ones follow. It stands twenty-third in the alphabet as a whole and seventh of the thirty-eight consonants, between Avestan Gge and Avestan Ce. 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. The tradition calls the script din dabireh, the religion writing. It served the Avesta and very little else, and the shape of its letter list follows the sounds of that one language rather than any general requirement of writing in Sasanian Iran. Transliteration is where the size of the letter list becomes visible to a reader who does not know the script. A scholarly edition carries accents, dots, rings and length marks, and every one of those marks stands in for a separate Avestan letter that the Roman alphabet has no room for.

The voiced velar fricative is among the sounds the parent hand was least able to keep apart from its neighbours. Giving it a letter of its own is a direct correction of a known ambiguity in the writing this alphabet was drawn from. 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+10B16 AVESTAN LETTER GHE. 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. 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.