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Aksa ࡉ

Mandaic Letters

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Origin The script took shape between the second and the seventh century CE

Aksa is the tenth letter of the Mandaic alphabet and writes the vowel i as well as the consonant y. It is the third of the three full vowel letters, with halqa and ushenna, and its name is one of the handful in the alphabet that does not follow the a plus sound pattern. It joins only to the right. Joined to ad it is read as the syllable di, and that joined pair is the ancestor of dushenna, the separate twenty-third letter, which began life as exactly this ligature and is now written as an undivided sign of its own. Because it joins only to the right, a word containing aksa is broken into more than one connected run, and those breaks are part of what makes joined Mandaic legible rather than one unbroken stroke.

Facts
Attestation
Meaning in the Attesting Source
The alphabet is called the abagada after its opening letters, and the traditional count of twenty-four is reached by adding the digraph adu and then writing the first letter again at the end 2Tradition: The Mandaic alphabet
Disputed
A Rival System's Attribution
The script's ancestry is assigned either to a cursive form of Aramaic, the derivation favored by most script historians, or to the Parthian chancery script used in Sasanian era administrative documents. 4Tradition: The Mandaic script
Both derivations are held in the literature and neither has displaced the other. The Aramaic cursive camp points to the letterforms' overall resemblance to other late Aramaic cursive scripts of the region, including Nabataean and Syriac; the Parthian chancery camp points to specific letterforms, including certain medial and final forms, that resemble Pahlavi documentary hands more closely than any Aramaic cursive exemplar. No single find has settled the question, and Mandaic paleography treats it as open pending further comparative work.
Origins
Origin Period
The script took shape between the second and the seventh century CE 1Tradition: The Mandaic script
Place of Origin
Lower Mesopotamia, among the Mandaean communities of southern Iraq and south-western Iran 3Tradition: The Mandaic script
Origin of the Name
Most letter names are formed from the letter's own sound with a preceding a, and do not continue the Northwest Semitic nouns that stand behind the Hebrew and Syriac names 1Tradition: The Mandaic script
Practice
Liturgical and Scriptural Role
Classical Mandaic, written in this script, is the liturgical language of the Mandaean religion; the community is small and now largely in diaspora, and its priestly knowledge is not open material 3Tradition: Mandaeism
Transmission
Manuscript Tradition
Mandaean texts are transmitted in manuscripts copied by priestly scribes, whose colophons record the chain of copyists standing behind each copy 3Tradition: Mandaean scribal transmission
Identity
Script Type
A true alphabet rather than an abjad: halqa, ushenna and aksa are full letters for the vowels a, u and i, where the related Semitic scripts write consonants and point the vowels 1Tradition: The Mandaic script
Position
Tenth of the twenty-two inherited letters 2Tradition: The Mandaic script
How the Letter Joins
Joins to the right only, so the letter that follows begins a new connected group 1Tradition: The Mandaic script
Attributions
Associated Sound
The vowel i and the consonant y, written as a full letter 1Tradition: The Mandaic script
Open Questions
Sense of the Name
Not established for this letter's own name
Aksa's own description states its name is "one of the handful in the alphabet that does not follow the a plus sound pattern" and names no sense; its own entry names aksa among the alphabet's irregular names.
Learn More
Aksa: The Mandaic Letter

Aksa is the tenth letter of the Mandaic alphabet and writes the vowel i as well as the consonant y. It joins only to the right.

It is the third of the three full vowel letters, with halqa and ushenna, and its name is one of the handful in the alphabet that does not follow the a plus sound pattern.

Joined to ad it is read as the syllable di, and that joined pair is the ancestor of dushenna, the separate twenty-third letter, which began life as exactly this ligature and is now written as an undivided sign of its own. Both still exist and do different jobs.

Because aksa joins only to the right, a word containing it is broken into more than one connected run, and those breaks are part of what makes joined Mandaic legible rather than one unbroken stroke. The letters that break a run are halqa, az, it, aksa and ash, together with the three signs that close the alphabet; everything else carries the stroke on.

Aksa holds the tenth place, where yod, yudh and the Arabic letter at ten stand in the neighbouring alphabets, all of which use that letter as a partial indicator of a long i or e. Mandaic made it a vowel outright.

In Hebrew and Syriac the tenth letter carries the numeral value ten and closes the run of units. Mandaic records no numeral use for its letters at all, so aksa marks a place in the sequence and a sound in the language and nothing further, and the correspondence with its cognates stops there.

Aksa and the Letters That Break a Word

Mandaic is written right to left and joined, as Syriac and Arabic are, so a word is drawn as a connected run. Eight signs do not join to the letter that follows them: halqa, az, it, aksa and ash among the inherited letters, and the three signs that close the alphabet, dushenna, kad and ain. After one of these the pen lifts and the next letter starts a fresh group.

This gives a line of Mandaic its visible structure. Word boundaries in a joined script are marked by spacing, which a cursive hand can reduce almost to nothing, so the breaks inside words are what stop a line reading as one continuous stroke. A reader uses them to segment before recognising any individual letter, and a long Mandaic word can otherwise carry a single unbroken stroke across most of its length.

Syriac has its own list of eight such letters and Arabic has one of six. The three lists overlap without matching, which is exactly what would be expected of three scripts that inherited the same alphabet and then went their own way in how they joined it. Comparing them is one of the few places where the kinship of these scripts is visible in the writing rather than in the order of the letters.

Aksa is on the Mandaic list, and since it is also a vowel letter, its breaks fall wherever an i does, which is often.

Cross-Tradition Connections

Derived from This

Dushenna ࡖ, Alphabet Letters

Dushenna began as a ligature of ad and aksa, and aksa is its second element. Aksa joins only to the right, and the ligature it helped form does the same. The ordinary joined sequence of ad and aksa still exists beside the ligature, so the two must be told apart by shape rather than by their parts.

Source The Unicode StandardThe Unicode Consortium

Related To

Dushenna ࡖ, Alphabet Letters

Dushenna began as a ligature of Ad and Aksa (899), per its own description; the ordinary joined sequence of the two still exists beside the hardened letter.

Source The Unicode StandardThe Unicode Consortium
Yod י, Alphabet Letters

Mandaic Aksa and Hebrew Yod occupy the same place in the twenty-two letter Aramaic sequence. Hebrew keeps the inherited noun as the letter name and the numeral value 10; Mandaic keeps neither. Where the Mandaic shapes came from is disputed, a cursive Aramaic hand or the Parthian chancery script.

Source The World's Writing SystemsPeter T. Daniels and William Bright (eds.)
Yudh ܝ, Alphabet Letters

Mandaic Aksa and Syriac Yudh hold the same place in the twenty-two letter Aramaic sequence both alphabets inherited. The shapes are unrelated to look at, so it is the order that carries the descent. Where the Mandaic shapes came from is disputed, a cursive Aramaic hand or the Parthian chancery script.

Source The World's Writing SystemsPeter T. Daniels and William Bright (eds.)
Sources
1. The Unicode Standard
The Unicode Consortium, The Unicode ConsortiumView the Source
2. The World's Writing Systems
Peter T. Daniels and William Bright (eds.), Oxford University Press, 1996View the Source
3. The Mandaeans: Ancient Texts and Modern People
Jorunn Jacobsen Buckley, Oxford University Press, 2002View the Source
4. Iranian Scripts for Aramaic Languages: The Origin of the Mandaic Script
Charles G. Haberl, Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 341, pp. 53 to 62, 2006View the Source
Open Questions (1 open question)
Do Mandaic's irregularly named letters (halqa, ushenna, it, aksa, in, ash) carry an inherited sense, or are they labels of a different kind?

Most Mandaic letters are named by their own sound with a preceding a (ab, ag, ad...), and their own descriptions state plainly this is a pronunciation label rather than an inherited word with a sense, unlike the Northwest Semitic nouns Hebrew and Syriac kept for the same slots. Six letters break that regular pattern by their own descriptions' own account (Its own text names the set: ushenna, aksa, dushenna, kad and it itself; In and Ash are separately marked as built on a different vowel or sound), and Dushenna and Kad, two of the six, already carry attested senses because they are documented ligatures of a real Aramaic word. The other four, plus Halqa, the very first letter and one of the script's three true vowel signs, whose name is equally outside the regular pattern, have no sense offered by any source consulted, and none of their descriptions states this as a settled absence either.

What would resolve this A study of Mandaic's own manuscript and liturgical tradition for these specific six names, checked against Mandaic vocabulary and against the older Aramaic sequence's inherited nouns for the same six slots (Aleph, Waw, Heth, Yod, Ayin, Shin), beyond what the general reference literature already surveys.
Mandaic studies; comparative Aramaic philologyThe Unicode Consortium, The Unicode Standard
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