An ࡍ

An is the fourteenth letter of the Mandaic alphabet and writes n, a voiced alveolar nasal. It joins on both sides, so it takes a full set of four shapes according to its place in a connected run and never forces the run to restart.

Its name is one of the regular ones, formed from the sound with a preceding a, as ab, ag, ad, ah and the rest are. The fish that stands behind Syriac nun and Hebrew nun has no counterpart in the Mandaic name, which describes a pronunciation and nothing further.

The fourteenth place is the one nun holds in Hebrew, in Syriac and in older Aramaic, and the correspondence runs through the whole of the first twenty-two signs, so a reader who knows one Aramaic alphabet can map the Mandaic order onto it letter by letter without recognising a single shape.

In Hebrew and Syriac the fourteenth letter carries the numeral value fifty, and in Hebrew it also has a separate final form counted apart from the twenty-two. Mandaic has neither. It records no numeral use for its letters at all, and it has positional forms rather than final letters, so the two things that make the fourteenth letter distinctive in Hebrew are both absent here.

Because an joins on both sides it is one of the letters that keeps a connected run going, so a long Mandaic word containing several of them can carry a single unbroken stroke across most of its length before a right-joining letter finally breaks it.

Classical Mandaic, written in these letters, is a liturgical language. It has a living descendant, usually called Neo-Mandaic, spoken by a very small number of people, and the relationship between the two is close without being identity: the classical language is preserved by the texts and the spoken one has gone its own way, as the weakening of the gutturals shows.

The number of speakers is very small and the community that carries the language is small too. Mandaeans are a Gnostic religious community of southern Iraq and south-western Iran, the only ancient Gnostic tradition with a continuous living membership, and since the early years of this century violence and displacement have scattered much of it into a diaspora spread across several continents. A liturgical script survives dispersal better than a spoken language does, because the books travel and the daily conversation does not.

That is the context in which a page like this one should be read. This is not a historical alphabet being described from the outside for interest. It is in current use by people, and the language behind it is endangered in the specific sense that linguists use the word.

What the atlas records about the letters is what can be stated publicly and checked. What the letters mean inside the tradition is the priesthood's, and it is not set out here.