Mim ܡ

Mim is the thirteenth letter of the Syriac abjad, with the numeral value forty. It writes m, a voiced bilabial nasal. It joins on both sides, so it carries a connected run onward rather than breaking it.

Its name is the inherited Northwest Semitic word for water. The same name and the same place in the sequence are held by Hebrew mem and, through the Phoenician sequence the Greeks borrowed, by the Greek mu, which is one of the plainest illustrations of how far a single letter of one alphabet can be traced.

Syriac has no set of final letters of the kind Hebrew developed. A Hebrew mem written at the end of a word is a different character with a different shape and, in the numeral system, a different value. A Syriac mim at the end of a word is the same letter drawn as the last member of a connected run. The distinction sounds technical and it matters for counting: Hebrew is often described as having twenty-two letters and five finals, while Syriac is described as having twenty-two letters, full stop, with positional forms that belong to the letters rather than standing beside them.

Mim is also frequent at the head of Syriac words, since m is the prefix of a large class of nouns and of participles, so it is a letter a reader meets in every position.

Hebrew and Syriac descend from the same Aramaic alphabet and answer the question of word-final shapes differently, which makes the pair a good place to see what a letter actually is.

Hebrew developed five final letters, kaph, mem, nun, pe and tzaddi, each a separate character with its own shape, its own place in an inventory, and in the numeral system its own value in the hundreds. They are counted apart from the twenty-two, and a Hebrew alphabet chart shows them as a group of their own.

Syriac did not do this. Its letters change shape according to their position in a joined group, so most of them have initial, medial, final and isolated forms, and none of those forms is a separate letter. A final kaph in the Serto hand drops a long tail below the line and is still kaph. The alphabet is twenty-two letters and a modern character standard nonetheless encodes a good many more Syriac signs, because it also has to carry ligatures, borrowings made for other languages, and one or two positional variants that a hand treats as distinct.

Mim shows the contrast cleanly because Hebrew mem is one of the five and Syriac mim is not. Nothing about the sound differs. What differs is whether a script decided that a shape used in one position deserved to be counted separately, and Syriac, being thoroughly cursive, decided that it did not.