Ah is the fifth letter of the Mandaic alphabet and writes h. It joins on both sides, so it can sit anywhere in a connected run.
With the affrication mark beneath it, ah stands for a pharyngeal fricative, a sound made by narrowing the throat well behind the place of an ordinary h. The Semitic gutturals weakened in Mandaic, which is one of the features that sets the language apart from its Aramaic relatives, and the marked ah is one of the ways a writer records a value the plain letters no longer carry reliably.
Its name follows the alphabet's usual pattern of the sound with a preceding a, which is why the fifth letter is called ah and not by any inherited noun. The window that stands behind Syriac he and Hebrew heh has no counterpart in the Mandaic name.
Ah holds the fifth place, which is where h stands in the inherited Aramaic order that the first twenty-two Mandaic letters keep without alteration. Its cognates in the neighbouring alphabets carry the numeral value five; Mandaic records no numeral use for its letters at all, and the modern character standard encodes no Mandaic digits, so the correspondence of place is not accompanied by a correspondence of number.
Because ah joins on both sides it takes initial, medial, final and isolated shapes, and a run of writing passes through it without a break. The letters that do force a break are few, and the fifth place is not one of them, so ah is among the letters that give a page of Mandaic its long unbroken strokes.