Asz ࡑ

Asz is the eighteenth letter of the Mandaic alphabet and writes an emphatic s, the counterpart of sadhe in the other Aramaic alphabets. It joins on both sides and takes a full set of four shapes.

Its name is spelled with sz in the modern character standard to keep it apart from as, the fifteenth letter, in a naming scheme that has to work in plain Latin letters with no diacritics at all. Nothing in Mandaic corresponds to the z, and the spelling says nothing about how the letter sounds.

With the affrication mark beneath it the letter carries a further sound from outside the inherited set, one of the several the mark supplies.

Eighteenth place is the one sadhe holds in the inherited Aramaic order, which the Mandaic sequence follows without alteration as far as the twenty-second sign. In Hebrew, Syriac and the Arabic abjad reckoning the letter at that place carries the numeral value ninety and closes the run of tens. Mandaic records no numeral use for its letters, so the eighteenth place here marks nothing but a position in the sequence and a sound in the language.

Because asz joins on both sides it takes initial, medial, final and isolated shapes and keeps a connected run going. Its counterpart in Syriac, sadhe, joins only to the right. The same place in the same inherited sequence is therefore filled by letters that behave differently in the two scripts, which is a reminder that joining behaviour was settled by each script on its own and is not part of the inheritance.

Semitic languages characteristically pair a plain consonant with an emphatic one, articulated further back in the mouth, and treat the two as separate sounds that distinguish words. The inherited alphabet gives each member of the pair its own letter, and Mandaic keeps them: asz beside as, att beside at, and aq at the nineteenth place.

What exactly emphasis consisted of in the older languages is described differently in different accounts, since the evidence is spellings and later reading traditions rather than recordings, and the modern languages that keep the contrast do not all keep it the same way. In Mandaic the letters are kept apart in writing, and the spoken language has narrowed some of the distinctions, as it has narrowed the gutturals.

The naming scheme makes this harder to see than it should be. Asz and as differ by a letter that stands for nothing; att and at differ by a doubled t that has nothing to do with length. Both spellings exist to keep names apart in a scheme without diacritics, and a reader who takes them as descriptions of the sounds will be misled in both cases.

The pairs also sit far apart in the sequence, at fifteen and eighteen, at nine and twenty-two. The inherited order does not group related consonants, which is one of the things that makes it look arbitrary and makes its survival across four alphabets meaningful.