Ak ࡊ

Ak is the eleventh letter of the Mandaic alphabet and writes k. It joins on both sides.

With the affrication mark beneath it, ak stands for a voiceless velar fricative, the sound in the Scottish pronunciation of loch.

Ak is also the first element of kad, an old ligature of ak and dushenna standing for the word meaning when or as, now written and counted as a single sign. Kad joins only to the right where ak joins on both sides, so the two behave differently on the page despite the shared origin.

The three diacritics of the script, the affrication mark, the vocalization mark and the gemination mark, are all written with the letter rather than beside it, and all three may be omitted from ordinary text. A page of Mandaic therefore records less than the script is capable of recording, and the reader supplies the rest from knowing the word.

Ak holds the eleventh place, where kaph stands in the inherited Aramaic order. In Hebrew and Syriac that letter opens the tens and carries the numeral value twenty. Mandaic records no numeral use for its letters at all, so the eleventh place carries no arithmetic with it here.

Because ak joins on both sides it takes a full set of four shapes and carries a connected run onward, where kad, the sign it helped form, joins only to the right and forces the next letter to start fresh. Two signs with one origin behaving differently on the page is the standing situation with the Mandaic ligature letters.

The Mandaic alphabet can be counted in more than one way, and the numbers that result are all correct answers to different questions.

The tradition counts twenty-four. That is the abagada: the twenty-two inherited letters, then dushenna, then halqa written a second time to close the sequence where it began. It is the count a recitation reaches and the one the alphabet's own name belongs to.

The modern character standard encodes twenty-five, because it must also carry kad, the ligature of ak and dushenna, which the traditional reckoning does not name, and ain, a late borrowing from Arabic. A standard has to serve editions of manuscripts as well as the count a community keeps, and a sign that appears in manuscripts has to be encodable whether or not it is a letter.

Counting only the inherited signs gives twenty-two, which is the number that matches Hebrew, Syriac and the Arabic abjad reckoning, and it is the right number for any comparison between the alphabets.

None of these is the true count and it is worth saying so plainly, because a reference work that prints one number without saying which question it answers leaves the next reader to discover the discrepancy and assume an error. This atlas holds twenty-five rows, one per encoded sign, and records on each of them where it stands in the tradition's own reckoning.