As ࡎ

As is the fifteenth letter of the Mandaic alphabet and writes s, a voiceless alveolar sibilant. It joins on both sides, so it keeps a connected run going rather than breaking it, and takes initial, medial, final and isolated shapes according to where it falls.

Its name follows the alphabet's usual pattern of the sound with a preceding a. The prop or support that stands behind Syriac semkath and Hebrew samekh has no counterpart in the Mandaic name.

Fifteenth place is where samekh stands in the inherited sequence. Mandaic keeps three sibilants apart in writing, as, asz and ash, at the fifteenth, eighteenth and twenty-first places, matching the Aramaic set exactly even where the spoken language has since blurred some of the distinctions between them.

The spelling of the name is a convention of the modern character standard rather than a fact about the letter. As, at fifteen, and asz, at eighteen, both write an s sound, one plain and one emphatic, and a naming scheme with no diacritics available has to keep them apart somehow. It does it by spelling the emphatic one with sz. Nothing in Mandaic corresponds to that z, and a reader should not take it for a separate sound.

The three sibilants do not behave alike on the page. As and asz join on both sides while ash joins only to the right, so one of the three forces a break in a word and the other two do not. Nothing about the sounds predicts that; the joining behaviour of each letter was settled separately.

The Semitic languages characteristically keep several s sounds apart and treat them as different consonants, and the inherited twenty-two letter alphabet gives each of them a sign. Mandaic keeps all three: as at fifteen, asz at eighteen, and ash at twenty-one, matching the places its relatives use.

Keeping them in writing and keeping them in speech are different things. The spoken language has blurred some of these distinctions, as it has blurred the gutturals, so the spelling of a classical Mandaic word preserves a contrast that a modern speaker may not make. That is the ordinary condition of a liturgical language, and the same gap between page and voice exists in Syriac.

The three letters are also spread widely through the alphabet rather than grouped, at the fifteenth, eighteenth and twenty-first places, which is a consequence of the inherited order and not of anything about the sounds. Nothing in the sequence collects related consonants together; the order is arbitrary and old, and that is exactly why it is such good evidence of descent when four alphabets share it.

Where a sound falls outside the inherited set entirely, Mandaic uses the affrication mark rather than a new letter. Marked ash covers the affricates that English writes ch and j, which loan words bring in constantly, so the sibilant letters carry more than their inherited share of the marked readings.