This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Mandaic Letters gathers the letters of the alphabet the Mandaean religion writes its own scripture in, a script that keeps the inherited Aramaic letter order for its first twenty two signs and then grows past it in ways none of its Semitic relatives do.
Mandaic is a true alphabet rather than an abjad: halqa, ushenna and aksa are full letters for the vowels a, u and i, not consonant signs pressed into service the way Hebrew, Syriac and Arabic press their semivowels. The first twenty two letters answer one for one to the inherited Aramaic sequence, and most of their names simply state the sound with a preceding a, ab, ag, ad and so on, unlike the older Semitic scripts that kept nouns such as house and door as letter names. The traditional count closes by writing halqa a second time after the twenty third sign, bringing the reckoning to twenty four, the abagada.
Dushenna, the twenty third sign, began as a ligature of ad and aksa and hardened into a letter of its own inside that traditional count of twenty four; kad, a further ligature of ak and dushenna, and ain, borrowed outright from Arabic, both stand outside it, which is how the modern character standard comes to encode twenty five Mandaic letters rather than the traditional twenty four. A mark called the affrication mark, written beneath a letter and often left off in ordinary text, extends several consonants to sounds the inherited alphabet lacked, chiefly for the Arabic and Persian vocabulary Mandaic absorbed. Letters differ in how they join: most connect on both sides, while halqa, az, it, aksa and ash join only to the right, breaking a word into separate connected runs.