Att ࡈ

Att is the ninth letter of the Mandaic alphabet and writes an emphatic t, one of the consonants that Semitic languages set apart from their plain counterparts by a secondary articulation further back in the mouth. It joins on both sides and takes a full set of four shapes according to where it falls in a run.

With the affrication mark beneath it the letter carries a further sound from outside the inherited set.

Att sits at the ninth place, where Aramaic has teth. The doubled t of its modern name keeps it apart in transliteration from at, the twenty-second letter, which writes the plain t. That doubling is a convention of the naming scheme rather than a fact about the letter: it says nothing about length or gemination, and the Mandaic script has a separate mark for gemination which is written with the letter and may be omitted.

The letters that join on both sides, att among them, carry a connected run onward, while the letters that join only to the right force the next letter to start a fresh one. Mandaic keeps the emphatic and plain pairs of its inherited alphabet in spelling in the same way its relatives do, so a word takes att or it takes at and the choice belongs to the root.

The names in this atlas for the Mandaic letters are the names the modern character standard uses, and that standard has to write every one of them in plain Latin letters with no diacritics available. Several names in the alphabet are shaped by that constraint rather than by anything in Mandaic.

Att is one. The ninth letter and the twenty-second letter both write a t, one emphatic and one plain, and a scheme without diacritics cannot mark emphasis. So the emphatic one is spelled with a doubled t and the plain one with a single t, and a reader who knows the conventions of Semitic transliteration, where a dot under a letter would ordinarily do this job, has to be told that the doubling is standing in for the dot and does not indicate a long consonant.

Asz, the eighteenth letter, is the same situation. It writes an emphatic s and is spelled with sz to keep it apart from as, the fifteenth. Nothing in Mandaic corresponds to the z.

The Syriac sixteenth letter, recorded simply as E, is the extreme case of the same pressure across the alphabets in this atlas.

None of these spellings is wrong, and all of them are worth flagging, because a reader meeting att and at in a list can reasonably conclude that one is a doubled form of the other. It is not. They are two letters, thirteen places apart.