The Mandaic alphabet is thought to have evolved between the 2nd and 7th century CE from either a cursive form of

Aramaic The Aramaic languages, short Aramaic ( syc, ܐܪܡܝܐ, Arāmāyā; oar, 𐤀𐤓𐤌𐤉𐤀; arc, 𐡀𐡓𐡌𐡉𐡀; tmr, אֲרָמִית), are a language family containing many varieties (languages and dialects) that originated i ...

(as did

Syriac Syriac may refer to: *Syriac language, an ancient dialect of Middle Aramaic *Sureth, one of the modern dialects of Syriac spoken in the Nineveh Plains region * Syriac alphabet ** Syriac (Unicode block) ** Syriac Supplement * Neo-Aramaic languages a ...

) or from the Parthian chancery script. The exact roots of the script are difficult to determine. It was developed by members of the Mandaean faith of southern

Mesopotamia Mesopotamia ''Mesopotamíā''; ar, بِلَاد ٱلرَّافِدَيْن or ; syc, ܐܪܡ ܢܗܪ̈ܝܢ, or , ) is a historical region of Western Asia situated within the Tigris–Euphrates river system, in the northern part of the ...

to write the

Mandaic language Mandaic is a southeastern Aramaic variety in use by the Mandaean community, traditionally based in southern parts of Iraq and southwest Iran, for their religious books. Classical Mandaic is still employed by Mandaean priests in liturgical rite ...

for

liturgical Liturgy is the customary public ritual of worship performed by a religious group. ''Liturgy'' can also be used to refer specifically to public worship by Christians. As a religious phenomenon, liturgy represents a communal response to and partic ...

purposes. Classical Mandaic and its descendant

Neo-Mandaic Neo-Mandaic, sometimes called the "''ratna''" ( ar, رطنة ''raṭna'' "jargon"), is the modern reflex of the Mandaic language, the liturgical language of the Mandaean religious community of Iraq and Iran. Although severely endangered, it sur ...

are still in limited use. The script has changed very little over centuries of use. The Mandaic name for the script is ''Abagada'' or ''Abaga'', after the first letters of the

alphabet An alphabet is a standardized set of basic written graphemes (called letters) that represent the phonemes of certain spoken languages. Not all writing systems represent language in this way; in a syllabary, each character represents a syllab ...

. Rather than the traditional Semitic letter names (''aleph'', ''beth'', ''gimel''), they are known as ''a'', ''ba'', ''ga'' and so on. It is written from right to left in horizontal lines. It is a

cursive Cursive (also known as script, among other names) is any style of penmanship in which characters are written joined in a flowing manner, generally for the purpose of making writing faster, in contrast to block letters. It varies in functionali ...

script, but not all letters connect within a word. Spaces separate individual words. During the past few decades, Majid Fandi al-Mubaraki, a Mandaean living in Australia, has digitized many Mandaean texts using typesetted Mandaic script.Mandaean Network

Letters

Mandaic chart from the Handbook of Classical and Modern Mandaic

The Mandaic alphabet contains 22 letters (in the same order as the Aramaic alphabet) and the digraph ''adu''. The alphabet is formally closed by repeating the first letter, ''a'', so that it has a symbolic count of 24 letters:

Vowels

Unlike most other Semitic alphabets, vowels are usually written out in full. The first letter, ''a'' (corresponding to ''alaph''), is used to represent a range of open vowels. The sixth letter, ''wa'', is used for close back vowels (''u'' and ''o''), and the tenth letter, ''ya'' is used for close front vowels (''i'' and ''e''). These last two can also serve as the consonants ''w/v'' and ''y''. The eighth letter corresponds to the Semitic ''

heth Heth, sometimes written Chet, but more accurately Ḥet, is the eighth letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician Ḥēt 𐤇 , Hebrew Ḥēth , Aramaic Ḥēth , Syriac Ḥēṯ ܚ, Arabic Ḥā' , and Maltese Ħ, ħ. Heth origin ...

'', and is called ''eh''; it is pronounced as a long ''i''-vowel but is used only as a suffix for the third person singular. The sixteenth letter, ''e'' (Aramaic '' ayn''), usually represents ''e'' at the beginning of a word or, when followed by ''wa'' or ''ya'', represents initial ''u'' or ''i'' respectively. A mark similar to an underscore () can be used to distinguish vowel quality for three Mandaic vowels. It is used in teaching materials but may be omitted from ordinary text. It is only used with vowels ''a'', ''wa'', and ''ya''. Using the letter ''ba'' as an example: * /bā/ becomes /ba/ * /bu/ becomes /bo/ * /bi/ becomes /be/

Gemination mark

A dot under a consonant () can be used to note

gemination In phonetics and phonology, gemination (), or consonant lengthening (from Latin 'doubling', itself from '' gemini'' 'twins'), is an articulation of a consonant for a longer period of time than that of a singleton consonant. It is distinct from ...

, indicating what native writers call a "hard" pronunciation. Sample words include (ekka) 'there is', (šenna) 'tooth', (lebba) 'heart', and (rabba) 'great'.

Ligatures

The 23rd letter of the alphabet is the digraph ''adu'' (''da'' + ''ya''), the relative particle (cf. Arabic

tāʾ marbūṭah Taw, tav, or taf is the twenty-second and last letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician Tāw , Hebrew Tav , Aramaic Taw , Syriac Taw ܬ, and Arabic ت Tāʼ (22nd in abjadi order, 3rd in modern order). In Arabic, it is also gives ...

, Coptic letter "ti", and English

ampersand The ampersand, also known as the and sign, is the logogram , representing the conjunction "and". It originated as a ligature of the letters ''et''—Latin for "and". Etymology Traditionally in English, when spelling aloud, any letter tha ...

). In addition to normal joining behavior, some Mandaic letters can combine to form various ligatures: * /kd/, /kḏ/, /ki/, /kl/, /kr/, /kt/, and /ku/ * /nd/, /ni/, /nm/, /nq/, /nt/, and /nu/ * /pl/, /pr/, and /pu/ * /ṣl/, /ṣr/, and /ṣu/ * /ut/ Both ''adu'' () and the old ligature kḏ () are treated as single characters in Unicode.

Extensions

Affrication mark

Postclassical and modern Mandaic use many Persian words. Various Mandaic letters can be re-purposed by placing two horizontally-aligned dots underneath (). This idea is comparable to the four novel letters in the Persian alphabet, allowing the alphabet to be used to represent foreign sounds (whether

affrication An affricate is a consonant that begins as a stop and releases as a fricative, generally with the same place of articulation (most often coronal). It is often difficult to decide if a stop and fricative form a single phoneme or a consonant pa ...

lenition In linguistics, lenition is a sound change that alters consonants, making them more sonorous. The word ''lenition'' itself means "softening" or "weakening" (from Latin 'weak'). Lenition can happen both synchronically (within a language at a pa ...

, or another sound): * /g/ becomes /γ/ * /d/ becomes /δ/ * /h/ becomes /ḥ/ * /ṭ/ becomes /ẓ/ * /k/ becomes /χ/ * /p/ becomes /f/ * /ṣ/ becomes /ž/ * /š/ becomes /č/, /ǰ/ * /t/ becomes /θ/

Ayin

Mandaic

ayin ''Ayin'' (also ''ayn'' or ''ain''; transliterated ) is the sixteenth letter of the Semitic scripts, including Phoenician , Hebrew , Aramaic , Syriac ܥ, and Arabic (where it is sixteenth in abjadi order only). The letter represen ...

() is borrowed from Arabic ayin (). Unlike in Arabic, Mandaic ayin does not join with other letters.

Punctuation and other marks

Punctuation is sparsely used in Mandaic text. A break in text can be indicated by two concentric circles (). A horizontal low line () can be used to justify text.

Magical and religious use

Each letter of the Mandaic alphabet is said to represent a power of life and light. Mandaeans view their alphabet as magical and sacred. The Semitic alphabet contains 22 letters. In order to bring this number to 24, the number of hours in a day, ''adu'' was added and ''a'' was repeated as the last letter of the Mandaic alphabet. Without this repetition the alphabet would be considered incomplete for magical purposes.

Unicode

The Mandaic alphabet was added to the

Unicode Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, ...

Standard in October, 2010 with the release of version 6.0. The Unicode block for Mandaic is U+0840–U+085F:

Gallery

File:Bowl with incantation for Buktuya and household, Mandean in Mandaic language and script, Southern Mesopotamia, c. 200-600 AD - Royal Ontario Museum - DSC09714.JPG, Bowl with incantation for Buktuya and household, c. 200-600 CE (

Royal Ontario Museum The Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) is a museum of art, world culture and natural history in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. It is one of the largest museums in North America and the largest in Canada. It attracts more than one million visitors every year ...

Toronto Toronto ( ; or ) is the capital city of the Canadian province of Ontario. With a recorded population of 2,794,356 in 2021, it is the most populous city in Canada and the fourth most populous city in North America. The city is the anch ...

, Canada) File:Bowl with incantation for Kuktan Pruk during her pregnancy, Mandean in Mandaic language and script, Southern Mesopotamia, c. 200-600 AD - Royal Ontario Museum - DSC09713.JPG, Bowl with incantation for Kuktan Pruk during her pregnancy, c. 200-600 CE (Royal Ontario Museum) File:Bowl with incantation to protect Anush Busai and his family against bad luck, Mandean in Mandaic language and script, southern Mesopotamia, c. 200-600 AD - Royal Ontario Museum - DSC09712.JPG, Bowl with incantation to protect Anush Busai and his family against bad luck, c. 200-600 CE (Royal Ontario Museum) File:Das Buch der Schrift (Faulmann) 103.jpg, Mandaic chart from Das Buch der Schrift (Book of Writing Systems), 1880, Carl Faulmann File:Illustrirte Geschichte der Schrift (Faulmann) 359.jpg, Page 314 of Illustrirte Geschichte Der Schrift (Illustrated History of Writing), 1880, Carl Faulmann File:Illustrirte Geschichte der Schrift (Faulmann) 360.jpg, Page 315 of Illustrirte Geschichte Der Schrift File:Illustrirte Geschichte der Schrift (Faulmann) 361.jpg, Page 316 of Illustrirte Geschichte Der Schrift File:Illustrirte Geschichte der Schrift (Faulmann) 430.jpg, Comparison chart from Illustrirte Geschichte Der Schrift File:Phoenician.png, Comparison chart from L'Encyclopedie Diderot & d'Alembert, volume 2

References

External links

Mandaic.org: Mandaic and Neo-Mandaic Texts and ResourcesNoto Sans Mandaic
from Google Fonts

from the Mandaean Network
Mandaic phonetic keyboard
from SIL Keyman {{Mandaeism footer Aramaic alphabet Abjad writing systems Right-to-left writing systems Mandaic language