Aq ࡒ

Aq is the nineteenth letter of the Mandaic alphabet and writes q, a voiceless stop made at the very back of the mouth, further back than k. It joins on both sides and takes initial, medial, final and isolated shapes according to where it falls in a connected run, so it never forces a break in the middle of a word.

Its name follows the alphabet's usual pattern of the sound with a preceding a, and the back of the head that stands behind the Syriac and Hebrew names has no counterpart in it.

Nineteenth place is where qoph stands in the inherited Aramaic sequence. In Hebrew and in Syriac the letter at that place is the first of the four that carry the hundreds, and in the Arabic abjad reckoning it carries one hundred as well. In Mandaic it carries nothing of the kind. No comparable use of the Mandaic letters as figures is described in the reference literature, and the modern character standard encodes no Mandaic digits at all.

That absence is recorded in this atlas as an open question rather than as a settled fact, because nothing states that the practice was absent either. It is a gap in the record and not a disagreement between scholars.

Because aq joins on both sides it never forces a break in the middle of a word, unlike halqa, az, it, aksa and ash. Its counterparts in Syriac and in Arabic behave the same way, so the nineteenth place happens to be one where the joining behaviour agrees across the three scripts, which is not the general rule.

Hebrew, Syriac and Arabic all use their letters as figures. The system is inherited with the sequence: units, then tens, then hundreds, so that the letter at the nineteenth place opens the hundreds in each of them. Mandaic descends from the same Aramaic stock and would be unremarkable for doing the same.

No alphanumeric numeral system for Mandaic is described in the reference literature consulted for this atlas, and the modern character standard encodes no Mandaic digits. That is the whole of the evidence, and it is evidence of silence rather than of absence. Nothing anywhere states that the Mandaic letters were never used as figures.

So the atlas records this as unknown rather than as a fact either way, and carries an open question saying what would settle it. What would settle it is a survey of numbering in dated Mandaean manuscripts and inscribed lead rolls, checking colophons, quire marks and folio numbers for letters standing as figures, together with a reading of the standard Mandaic grammars on how numbers are written out. The disciplines that would have to do it are Semitic palaeography and Mandaean manuscript studies.

This is the atlas doing what a reference work usually cannot. Most books either assert that Mandaic has no numerals or say nothing at all. Naming the gap, saying what would close it, and saying who could close it leaves the door open for someone to walk through.