Ad ࡃ

Ad is the fourth letter of the Mandaic alphabet and writes d. It joins on both sides. With the affrication mark written beneath it, ad stands for a voiced dental fricative, the th of English this.

Ad is also the first element of the twenty-third sign of the alphabet, dushenna, which began as a ligature of ad and aksa and hardened into a letter in its own right. The ordinary joined sequence of ad and aksa still exists beside it and is read as the syllable di, so the two have to be told apart by shape rather than by the parts they are made of.

The affrication mark is written under the letter and may be left off in ordinary text, so a reader supplies the distinction from the word rather than from the page.

Ad holds the fourth place, where d stands in the inherited Aramaic order. Unlike Syriac, where dalath and rish share a single stroke and a point alone tells them apart, the Mandaic shapes for ad and ar are separate signs, so this script does not carry that particular ambiguity of its Aramaic relatives. That is worth stating because the ambiguity is a real burden on Syriac editors, and Mandaic simply does not have it.

In Hebrew and Syriac the letter at this place carries the numeral value four, and in Syriac it is also one of the six letters that take a hard and a soft reading governed by the grammar of the word. Mandaic has neither the numerals nor that alternation. Two scripts do quite different amounts of work with the letter standing at the same place in the same inherited sequence.

Dushenna, the twenty-third sign of the abagada, was not always a letter. It began as a ligature: two letters, ad and aksa, written joined, and read as the syllable di. Aramaic used that syllable to write the relative pronoun and the marker of the genitive, one of the most frequent things anybody writes in the language, and a shorthand for something written that often tends to fuse.

What makes the Mandaic case interesting is that the fusion did not replace the parts. The ordinary joined sequence of ad and aksa is still written, and still read as di, beside a separate undividable sign that came from it. Two things with one origin and different jobs now sit in the same alphabet, and a reader tells them apart by shape rather than by decomposing them.

The same thing happened a second time. Kad, the sign after dushenna, began as a ligature of ak and dushenna, so it is a ligature built on a ligature, and it too became an undivided sign.

This is how alphabets in this family grow when they grow at all: not by inventing shapes, and not by borrowing them, but by promoting a habit of writing into a letter. Syriac had a comparable ligature of yudh and he and never promoted it, so the Syriac count stayed at twenty-two while the Mandaic count went past it. The difference is a decision about what to call a letter, not about what scribes actually wrote.