Kad ࡗ

Kad is a sign of the Mandaic alphabet that began as a ligature of ak and dushenna, written for the word meaning when, or as, or like. As dushenna did, it hardened into a letter used as an undivided whole, and it is usually written on its own.

It joins only to the right, where ak, the letter it grew out of, joins on both sides, so the two behave differently on the page despite their shared origin. Dushenna, its other element, is itself a hardened ligature, which makes kad a ligature built on a ligature.

Kad falls outside the traditional count of twenty-four, which runs from halqa to at, adds dushenna, and then closes by writing halqa a second time. The modern character standard encodes twenty-five Mandaic letters, more than the traditional reckoning names, because it has to serve editions of manuscripts as well as the count the tradition itself keeps.

This atlas holds an entry for kad for the same reason a standard encodes it: the sign exists, it appears in writing, and a reader meeting it needs somewhere to look it up. Where it stands in the tradition's own reckoning is recorded on the entry rather than assumed.

Because kad joins only to the right, whatever follows it begins a fresh connected group. It is usually written on its own, standing for the whole word it was made to represent, so a reader meets it as a unit rather than as a letter inside a spelling. That is an unusual thing for anything counted among the signs of an alphabet.

An alphabet is two things at once, and they can disagree. It is a set of signs that appear in writing, and it is a list that a community recites, teaches and counts. Usually the two match. In Mandaic they do not, and kad is where they come apart.

The traditional count is twenty-four and it does not include kad. The modern character standard encodes twenty-five and it does. Neither is wrong. A recitation is about what the tradition holds its alphabet to be; an encoding is about what a manuscript might contain and what an edition might need to reproduce. A sign that appears in real writing has to be encodable whether or not it is a letter.

The same tension produces much larger discrepancies in Syriac, where a character inventory runs to far more entries than twenty-two because it carries ligatures, positional forms, Garshuni signs and letters borrowed by other languages entirely.

The practical rule for reading any alphabet entry in this atlas is therefore to ask which question a count is answering. Twenty-two is the inherited sequence and the number to use for comparison. Twenty-four is the abagada as the tradition keeps it. Twenty-five is the encoded range. This atlas holds twenty-five rows and records on each one where it stands in the other two reckonings, which is the only arrangement that does not quietly overrule somebody.