Avestan Me 𐬨

The sound is a plain m, the lips closed and the air released through the nose. It closes the run of ordinary nasal letters. The nasal letters form a block of eight, running from the velar nasal at the back of the mouth to the bilabial at the lips, with the palatal and the positionally restricted signs among them. Eight signs for the nasals is an unusual provision, and it exists because the recitation distinguished all eight. It stands forty-first in the alphabet as a whole and twenty-fifth of the thirty-eight consonants, between Avestan Nne and Avestan Hme. 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. 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. Whoever devised the alphabet is not recorded. The script can be dated and placed with reasonable confidence, but no source names the person or the group responsible, and the atlas records that absence rather than filling it.

With the bilabial nasal the nasal series closes. Eight signs have gone to the nasals, where a script written for ordinary purposes would have provided two or three. Book Pahlavi is the hand behind these letterforms, and the relationship between the two is one of correction. In that writing a number of originally distinct sounds had come to share a single shape, so reading it depends on recognising words rather than on assembling them from letters.

The Avestan alphabet takes the same pen strokes and separates what had merged. Because the surviving copies are late, the evidence for what any individual letter did rests on the consistency of the manuscript tradition rather than on early witnesses. Where the copies agree, editors follow them; where they do not, the disagreement is recorded rather than settled by preference. In the digital record the letter is encoded at U+10B28 AVESTAN LETTER ME. 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. Zoroastrianism is a living religion with a small community, and the Avesta is its liturgy rather than its archive. The letters of this alphabet are therefore not an antiquarian matter. They record sounds a priest is still expected to produce.