Ag ࡂ

Ag is the third letter of the Mandaic alphabet and writes g. It joins on both sides.

A mark written under a letter, called the affrication mark, extends the alphabet to sounds the language did not originally have, and ag carrying that mark stands for a voiced velar fricative, the sound written gh in transcriptions of Arabic and Persian. The mark is one of three diacritics in the script, the others marking vowel quality and gemination, and all three may be left off in ordinary writing and supplied by the reader.

Mandaic took in a large Iranian vocabulary early, and Arabic and Persian influence on the modern spoken dialect is heavy, so the marked letters are what a writer reaches for when a loan word will not fit the inherited sounds.

Ag holds the third place, where g stands in Hebrew, in Syriac and in the older Aramaic order. Its name is formed on the alphabet's usual plan, the sound with a preceding a, and carries no separate sense; the camel behind Syriac gamal and Hebrew gimel has no counterpart here.

Because ag joins on both sides it takes a full set of four shapes and carries a connected run onward, unlike the letters that join only to the right and force the run to restart after them.

The affrication mark is a small stroke written beneath a Mandaic letter, and it is the mechanism by which a twenty-two letter inherited alphabet went on serving a language that acquired sounds it had no letters for. Marked ag is a voiced velar fricative, marked ad a voiced dental fricative, marked ah a pharyngeal, marked ak a voiceless velar fricative, marked ap an f, marked ash the affricates written ch and j in English spelling. The alphabet did not grow; the letters were annotated.

That is the same solution Syriac reached for with Garshuni and the same one Turoyo uses with three dots, and it is worth noticing how consistently the scripts of this family chose it. Adding letters would have unsettled the order, the count and, in Syriac and Hebrew, the numeral values that hang on the order. Adding marks costs nothing.

The reason Mandaic needed the marks is a history of contact. Iranian vocabulary entered Mandaic early and in quantity, and Arabic and Persian have shaped the modern spoken language heavily. A small community speaking a minority language inside larger ones borrows constantly, and its script has to keep up.

The marks are also optional. Ordinary writing leaves them off and expects the reader to know the word, in the same way Syriac leaves off its points. A page of Mandaic therefore records less than it could, and the reader supplies the rest.