Ap ࡐ

Ap is the seventeenth letter of the Mandaic alphabet and writes p. It joins on both sides, so it carries a connected run onward.

With the affrication mark beneath it, ap stands for f, a sound the inherited alphabet had no separate letter for and which Arabic and Persian loan words bring in constantly. The affrication mark is one of three diacritics in the script, the others marking vowel quality and gemination, and all three may be left off in ordinary writing and supplied by the reader.

Seventeenth place is where pe stands in the Aramaic order, and it is one of the twenty-two places that answer letter for letter to the older Aramaic sequence. Every addition that takes the alphabet past twenty-two comes after the twenty-second sign, so the inherited block is unbroken.

Its name follows the alphabet's usual pattern, and the mouth that stands behind Syriac pe and Hebrew peh has no counterpart in it.

Syriac handles the same pair of sounds differently. There, pe is one of six letters carrying a hard and a soft reading governed by the grammar of the word, and the soft reading is f. In Mandaic the f is written by marking the letter, which is a borrowing device rather than a grammatical alternation. Same two sounds, two quite different pieces of machinery.

Mandaic has been a minority language for its whole documented history, spoken by a small community inside much larger linguistic worlds, and its vocabulary shows it. Iranian words entered the language early and in quantity. Arabic and Persian have shaped the modern spoken dialect heavily.

An alphabet fitted to one language does not fit another, and the sounds arrive before the letters do. Mandaic answered with the affrication mark rather than with new letters, so marked ap writes f, marked ag a voiced velar fricative, marked ak the sound in loch, marked ash the affricates of ch and j, marked ad and marked at the two th sounds. Six or more of the inherited letters do double duty this way.

The choice not to add letters is worth noticing, because Mandaic did add signs at other times: two ligature letters and, later, a borrowed Arabic one. So the alphabet was not treated as untouchable. What the marks bought was that the inherited twenty-two stayed intact and in order, which is the part of the alphabet the tradition counts and recites.

There is a limit to how much this can be pushed. The marks are optional and are commonly left off, so a page of Mandaic often does not distinguish a loan word's sound from the inherited one it is written with. The reader supplies it, which means the reader has to know the word already.