Avestan Nge 𐬢

The sound is a velar nasal, the back of the tongue against the soft palate and the air released through the nose, which English spells ng in sing. 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 thirty-fifth in the alphabet as a whole and nineteenth of the thirty-eight consonants, between Avestan Bhe and Avestan Ngye. 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. 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. 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.

The nasal series is where the alphabet's three way velar division becomes a system rather than a set of separate signs. Plain, palatalised and rounded appear among the nasals exactly as they do among the fricatives. Vowel writing is the innovation that separates this alphabet from everything else written in Iran at the time. The letterforms are Pahlavi and the right to left direction is Pahlavi. The vowels are not: they are full letters, and they come first in the order.

No Avestan manuscript survives from earlier than the thirteenth century of the common era. Every copy in existence is therefore many centuries younger than the alphabet, and the alphabet is many centuries younger again than the words. What reaches a modern edition has passed through both gaps. In the digital record the letter is encoded at U+10B22 AVESTAN LETTER NGE. 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.