Talk:Avestan alphabet

x^v and ŋ^v

1. Per unicode def, /xᵛ/ should look like /xv/ but appears for me as /x^(v)/. Does anyone else have this problem?
2. Given that its actually two distinct characters (at least I don't think U+1D5B is a combining diacritical mark) and both Hoffman and Bartholomae render /xv/ as /x^v/ (as in x^varənah), shouldn't we too?

-- Fullstop 20:41, 2 September 2007 (UTC)

Both Bartholomae and Hoffmann are not linguists. The IPA is a linguistic tool. They are doing the best they can with the tools they have. Either Skærvø 2006 "An Introduction to Old Avestan," or, (in my opinion less good) Beekes 1988, A Grammar of Gatha-Avestan are preferable -- they distinguish between the phonemes more clearly, and neither of them actually believe the <x^v> character to be a separate phoneme. Moreover, there is serious disagreement as to how that thing was even pronounced; Skærvø (2006:2) claims that the (famous) word gen.sg. x^vǝ̄ṇg 'of the sun' is disyllabic, whereas Hoffmann (2004:35) claims it's monosyllabic. Either way it's difficult to say what's really going on with this character as it seems to sometimes represent /hu/ and sometimes /xv/ depending on the following segment, but I think both of those are solid possibilities -- much more so than /x^w/ which is actually not supported by any of the literature. I think the entire IPA section needs serious work as there are effectively no citations and the distinction between phonemes and allophones is unclear (although to what extent the IPA section is even necessary in a page that has to do with the alphabet is also unclear).

P.S. I do not mean to malign Hoffmann or his work on Avestan as he is single-handedly responsible for the possibility of the modern study of Avestan due to his exegesis on how the orthography actually works and his (and Forsman's) 2004 (2nd. ed.) Avestische Laut- und Flexionslehre is still the standard reference grammar for Avestan. He is just not a linguist, and if there was any doubt about that at all, read his 1967 monograph Der Injunktiv im Veda.

Vindafarna (talk) 22:23, 21 November 2023 (UTC)

long ã ?

Is there no long ã corresponding to letter AAN, looking at the ipa column? Had they fallen together?CecilWard (talk) 02:02, 9 February 2018 (UTC)

The Skjærvø source says "Both [are] nasal ą, used (apparently) indiscriminately in the extant manuscripts but may originally have represented nasal ą and ə̨." Octavo (talk) 05:00, 28 August 2021 (UTC)

The Faulmann table image has the consonant NNE (𐬧) as the long counterpart of the vowel AAN (𐬅). This at least makes graphical sense, substituting the long a for the short within the glyph. Octavo (talk) 22:18, 12 November 2021 (UTC)

Modern Persian equivalents

Are there any possible equivalents between the Avestan letters, and those in modern Persian? If so, why not include them? BlueBlurHog (talk) 01:48, 4 April 2024 (UTC)