Alphabet Letters
Avestan Zhe 𐬲
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.
Zhe writes a voiced palato-alveolar sibilant, the sound English spells with s in measure, and is the voiced partner of She. Four sibilant signs in this region cover distinctions that most writing systems leave to context. The alphabet had no need to be economical, because it was drawn up once, for one text, by people whose concern was accuracy rather than speed of writing. Avestan is written right to left, and its vowels are full letters standing in the line rather than marks hung on a consonant. That is the clearest break the script makes with the Pahlavi writing behind it. The Avesta was composed long before any script existed to hold it, and priests carried it in memory. This alphabet was made in Sasanian Iran, centuries later, to fix in writing what recitation had already preserved.
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 PositionThirty-fifth 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 SoundVoiced palato-alveolar sibilant, the sound English spells with s in measure 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 voiced palato-alveolar sibilant it writes, zhe, following the same convention rather than an inherited word. 1 Sense of the Namethe zh of measure, a voiced sibilant 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+10B32 AVESTAN LETTER ZHE 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 Zhe: The Letter in the Avestan Alphabet
The sound is a voiced palato-alveolar sibilant, which English writes with the s of measure and French with the j of jour. The sibilants close the consonant section before the final letter, and they are the largest family in the alphabet: six signs, where the scripts around it managed with two or three. The group runs from the plain s and z through the sh sounds, of which there are four. It stands fifty-first in the alphabet as a whole and thirty-fifth of the thirty-eight consonants, between Avestan She and Avestan Shye. Nothing in that placement was handed down. The sequence was arranged by whoever assembled the alphabet, and it records their view of how the sounds of the language stand in relation to one another.
The people who drew up this alphabet were not recording a language they spoke. Avestan had ceased to be anybody's mother tongue centuries before, and what they had in front of them was a recitation preserved by priests who had learned it by ear. The letters record that recitation, sound by sound, at the level of detail the reciters maintained. 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.
Avestan Zhe and the Voiced Partner
The voiced counterpart of sh is provided because the pairing runs throughout the alphabet. Where a sound has a voiced partner in the language, the letter list has a sign for it. 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+10B32 AVESTAN LETTER ZHE. The block covers the letters together with a small set of punctuation marks used in the manuscripts. Standardising it settled, for digital purposes at least, a question the printed editions had answered in several different ways, which is how many letters the alphabet has. 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.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Related To
The voiceless and voiced palato-alveolar sibilants, the sounds English writes sh and the s of measure.
The voiced and voiceless palato-alveolar sibilants, the sounds English writes with the s of measure and with sh.
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