Dushenna ࡖ

Dushenna, also called adu, is the twenty-third letter of the Mandaic alphabet. It joins only to the right.

It began as a ligature of ad and aksa, the fourth and tenth letters, whose joined form was read di and which Aramaic used to write the relative pronoun and the marker of the genitive. Mandaic treats the ligature as a letter in its own right, undividable, usually written at the head of a word or standing alone.

The ordinary joined sequence of ad and aksa still exists beside it with the same origin and a different job, which is the sort of split that happens when a shorthand hardens into a letter. The two have to be told apart by shape rather than by the parts they are made of.

Dushenna is the twenty-third sign of the abagada in the traditional count, which then closes by writing halqa a second time to reach twenty-four. It is therefore the last new sign the tradition's own reckoning names, and everything after it, kad and ain, sits outside that count and is present in the modern character standard because manuscripts require it.

Because dushenna joins only to the right, whatever follows it begins a fresh connected group, which suits a sign usually written at the head of a word or standing alone. Its other name, adu, records the two letters it was made from, and both names are current in the reference literature, so a reader meeting one should know to look for the other.

The relative particle is one of the most frequent things anybody writes in an Aramaic language. It attaches one noun to another, it introduces a clause, and it does the work that English spreads across of, that and which. In Syriac it is written by dalath, prefixed to the word. In Mandaic the same particle produced a letter.

The route is documented in the shape. Ad and aksa written joined read as the syllable di, which is the particle, and a sequence written that often fuses. What is unusual is that Mandaic then counted the fused shape as a letter of the alphabet, gave it a name, and put it in the recitation at the twenty-third place. Syriac had a comparable ligature of yudh and he and never promoted it, so the Syriac count stayed at twenty-two.

This is a decision about what an alphabet is, and it is the tradition's own decision rather than a linguistic accident. The abagada is what the community recites and counts, and dushenna is in it.

There is a limit to how far that can be read. What the tradition holds about its letters, individually or as a set, belongs to a priesthood entered by initiation and is not open material. The atlas records the count, the name, the origin in a ligature and the particle it writes, all of which are publicly documented, and does not go past them.