The Khordeh Avesta, the Little Avesta, is the lay prayer book and in practical terms the most important text in the religion, because it is the one that ordinary people own and use. It collects the five gah prayers, the kusti formulas, the confession of faith, the niyayeshes addressed to the sun, Mithra, the moon, the waters and fire, the yashts or hymns to individual yazatas, and blessings for ordinary occasions. It is printed with the Avestan text alongside a transliteration and a gloss in Gujarati, Persian or now English. The important sociological fact is that the great majority of Zoroastrians learn these prayers phonetically as sound patterns without understanding the Avestan, which is a dead language, and that this has been true for a very long time. Reformist movements from the nineteenth century onward have pressed for prayer in the vernacular and have made limited headway; the tradition's counter-argument is that the sound itself carries the efficacy, which is a position with parallels in several other liturgical traditions.