It ࡇ

It is the eighth letter of the Mandaic alphabet and stands where Aramaic, Hebrew and Syriac all have heth. It joins only to the right, so the letter after it begins a new connected group.

The modern character standard describes it as a pharyngeal, a sound made by narrowing the throat, though the gutturals weakened in Mandaic and the letter's reading in the spoken language has moved a long way from its classical value. That gap between the description and the reading is ordinary in a liturgical language and is not a defect in either.

Its name breaks the alphabet's usual pattern of a plus the sound, as do ushenna, aksa, in, dushenna and kad. Those irregular names are among the clearest signs that the Mandaic alphabet is not the Aramaic one relabelled.

It holds the eighth place in an order the first twenty-two Mandaic letters keep unchanged, so its counterparts are Syriac heth, Hebrew cheth and the Arabic letter at eight in the abjad reckoning. In Hebrew and Syriac that letter carries the numeral value eight; Mandaic records no numeral use for its letters, so the correspondence stops at the place in the sequence.

Because it joins only to the right, a word containing it is broken into more than one connected run. The letters that behave this way are halqa, az, it, aksa and ash, together with the three signs that close the alphabet, and those breaks are what keep a line of joined writing from reading as one continuous stroke.

Six Mandaic letter names do not follow the alphabet's own naming plan: ushenna, aksa, it, in, dushenna and kad. The other nineteen are formed from the letter's sound with a preceding a, which is a scheme so regular that it looks designed. The six that break it are worth grouping, because they break it in different ways and for different reasons.

Dushenna and kad are the two ligature letters, and their names come from what they were made to write rather than from how they sound. Ushenna and aksa are two of the three vowel letters, and both carry names that a sound-plus-a scheme could not have produced for a vowel anyway. It and in are the two letters standing where the old pharyngeals were, and both are built on the vowel i rather than on a.

That leaves a pattern inside the exceptions, which is more interesting than a list of irregularities. The letters with unusual names are the letters doing unusual jobs: the vowels, the old gutturals, and the ligatures.

None of this tells anyone what the names mean, and for most of them there is nothing to mean. A name that says how to pronounce a letter is not a word with a sense, and the temptation to read significance into these names is one the atlas declines. Where a Mandaic letter name does carry a sense, as dushenna and kad do, the atlas records it.