Avestan phonology


This article deals with the phonology of Avestan. Avestan is one of the Iranian languages and retained archaic voiced alveolar fricatives. It also has fricatives rather than the aspirated series seen in the closely related Indo-Aryan languages.

Consonants

According to Beekes, and are allophones of /θ/ and /x/ respectively.

''š'' versus ''rt''

Avestan š continues Indo-Iranian *-rt-. Its phonetic value and its phonological status are somewhat unclear.
The conditions under which change from -rt- to -š- occurs are fundamentally ill-defined. Thuz, for example, Gathic/Younger ərəta/arəta is a variant of aša but is consistently written with r t/. Similarly, arəti and aši. But aməša is consistently written with š, while marəta is consistently written with r t. In some instances, a change is evident in only Younger Avestan. For example, the Gathic Avestan word for "bridge" is pərətūm, while in Younger Avestan it is pəšūm. Both are singular accusative forms, but when the word is singular nominative, the Younger Avestan variant is again with r t.
Benveniste suggested š was only a convenient way of writing /rt/ and should not be considered phonetically relevant. According to Gray, š is a misreading, representing /r r/, of uncertain phonetic value but "probably" representing a voiceless r.
Miller follows the older suggestion that Avestan š represents a phoneme of its own, for which he introduces the symbol "/Ř/" and identifies phonetically as . He goes on to suggest that in writing, -rt- was restored when a scribe was aware of a morpheme boundary between the /r/ and /t/.

Vowels

Transcription

There are various conventions for transliteration of Din Dabireh. We adopt the following one here.
Vowels:
Consonants:
The glides y and w are often transcribed as ii and uu, imitating Din Dabireh orthography. The letter transcribed t̰ indicates an allophone of with no audible release at the end of a word and before certain obstruents.