Al is the twelfth letter of the Mandaic alphabet and writes l, a voiced alveolar lateral. It joins on both sides and so takes a full set of four shapes, initial, medial, final and isolated, according to where it falls in a connected run.
Its name follows the alphabet's usual pattern of the sound with a preceding a, and carries no separate sense; the ox-goad behind Syriac lamadh and Hebrew lamed has no counterpart here.
Twelfth place is where l stands in the inherited Aramaic order, which the first twenty-two Mandaic letters follow without alteration. The Mandaic alphabet is a new set of shapes and a new set of names laid over an old sequence, and it is the sequence rather than the shapes that shows the descent most plainly to a reader who knows another Aramaic script.
Unlike Syriac lamadh, which rises above the line in every hand and is the chief landmark on a Syriac page, al carries no comparable prominence in Mandaic. The two letters answer to one another by place in the sequence and by sound, and the resemblance stops there, which is the general situation between these two alphabets.
In Hebrew and Syriac the letter at this place carries the numeral value thirty, and in Syriac it also writes a very common preposition and object marker, which is part of why it is the most conspicuous letter on a Syriac page. Mandaic has neither the numeral value nor that grammatical load, so al is an ordinary letter of the alphabet rather than a landmark on the line.