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Ar and an Ambiguity Mandaic Does Not Have

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Ar and an Ambiguity Mandaic Does Not Have

Two features of the Aramaic-descended scripts put a large share of the work on the reader. One is that the vowels are not written, so an unpointed word can be read several ways and the reader supplies the right one. The other is that some letters differ only by a dot, most famously Syriac dalath and rish, which share one skeleton in every hand and are separated by a point written below the stroke for the first and above it for the second.

Mandaic has neither problem. Its three vowel letters put the vowels in the line, and its shapes for ad and ar are distinct signs that no one would confuse.

That is worth saying carefully, because it is easy to turn into a claim that Mandaic is a better script, which is not a claim the atlas makes or could support. Scripts are fitted to the languages and the purposes they serve, and Syriac pointing developed precisely because the ambiguity mattered and was solved. What can be said is narrower: a reader coming to Mandaic from Syriac or Hebrew will find two specific burdens absent, and a modern editor of a Mandaic manuscript does not face the dalath and rish decision that a Syriac editor faces on every page.

Mandaic has its own difficulties instead. Its three optional diacritics are commonly left off, so a marked reading has to be supplied from knowing the word.

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