Ah ࡄ

Ah is the fifth letter of the Mandaic alphabet and writes h. It joins on both sides, so it can sit anywhere in a connected run.

With the affrication mark beneath it, ah stands for a pharyngeal fricative, a sound made by narrowing the throat well behind the place of an ordinary h. The Semitic gutturals weakened in Mandaic, which is one of the features that sets the language apart from its Aramaic relatives, and the marked ah is one of the ways a writer records a value the plain letters no longer carry reliably.

Its name follows the alphabet's usual pattern of the sound with a preceding a, which is why the fifth letter is called ah and not by any inherited noun. The window that stands behind Syriac he and Hebrew heh has no counterpart in the Mandaic name.

Ah holds the fifth place, which is where h stands in the inherited Aramaic order that the first twenty-two Mandaic letters keep without alteration. Its cognates in the neighbouring alphabets carry the numeral value five; Mandaic records no numeral use for its letters at all, and the modern character standard encodes no Mandaic digits, so the correspondence of place is not accompanied by a correspondence of number.

Because ah joins on both sides it takes initial, medial, final and isolated shapes, and a run of writing passes through it without a break. The letters that do force a break are few, and the fifth place is not one of them, so ah is among the letters that give a page of Mandaic its long unbroken strokes.

The Semitic languages characteristically keep a set of consonants made deep in the throat, the gutturals, and they are among the first sounds to weaken when a language changes. In Mandaic they weakened early and thoroughly, and that is one of the features by which the language is identified and set apart from the other Aramaic dialects.

The consequences are visible in the alphabet. The eighth letter, it, stands where Aramaic, Hebrew and Syriac all have heth, and the modern character standard describes it as a pharyngeal while the letter's reading in the spoken language has moved a long way from that classical value. The sixteenth letter, in, stands where the others have ayin and is read in Mandaic as the vowel e as well as carrying the old pharyngeal value. Ah with the affrication mark supplies a pharyngeal that the plain letters no longer deliver.

So the script has ended up recording, with marks and with shifted readings, a set of distinctions the language itself has largely let go. That is not decay and it is not confusion. It is what happens to a liturgical language: the classical spelling is preserved because the texts are preserved, while the spoken descendant goes its own way.

Neo-Mandaic, still spoken by a very small number of people, is that descendant. Its relationship to the classical language written in these letters is close and is not identity.