The language called Avash, meaning “pure water as from a stream or river,” shares its name with an Iranian village named Spring of Avash. The religious Parsi form āvā means “sacred waters”, and to the Middle Persian plural form āvān, and is offered as a script and language aspiring to universal use — phonetic, learnable, and drawn from the patterns of nature and mathematics rather than the conventions of any one culture.
Its 23 letters are built from forms found throughout the natural world — the spirals of shells and pinecones, the curve of leaves, the radial symmetry of flowers and the eye. The mathematical constants that shape these natural forms appear in the geometry of the letters. Taken together, the alphabet traces an order of emergence echoed in the natural world: from mineral to plant, animal, human, and spiritual. The number twenty-three carries its own quiet resonance — it is also the pair-count of chromosomes shared by every human being.
The script is phonetic — each letter consistently representing one sound — with a small set of diacritical marks to accommodate the phonemes of the world’s languages, including indigenous ones. It is currently written right-to-left.
Avash means pure water, as from a stream or river. It has been the quiet work of Rod Markham since 29 June 1989, developed independently, with no affiliation to any organisation or government.
Avash is presented as a prospective universal auxiliary alphabet — a script intended to complement existing writing systems, not to replace them. Its further refinement is envisioned as a collaborative process through a representative body, so that its evolution might reflect diverse perspectives.
What follows is a tour: the alphabet letter by letter, the language built on it, and the natural patterns that have shaped both across more than three decades. Offered, with respect, to whoever may find use in it.
The Philosophy of Avash here