Mandaic has spent its documented history as the language of a small community inside larger ones, and Arabic has been the largest of them for well over a thousand years. The marks on the inherited letters record that pressure: f, the velar and dental fricatives, the affricates, all supplied for words the language took in. Ain records it differently, by bringing over a letter whole.
The point is easily overstated in either direction. A borrowed letter at the end of a range is not evidence that a script was overwhelmed, and the inherited twenty-two are untouched and still in order. It is evidence of ordinary contact, of the sort every minority language has with its neighbours.
What is not ordinary is the position of the community itself. Mandaeans are a small and endangered religious minority, and the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have been hard on them: displacement, violence and the emigration of much of the Iraqi community since the early years of this century have left a diaspora spread across several continents and a spoken language with very few remaining speakers.
The script is in current liturgical use in that diaspora. An entry describing its last encoded sign should say so, because the alternative is to write about a living tradition in the past tense, which is a mistake this atlas is built to avoid.