Divinity Atlas

Sacred Correspondences
Articles

Att: The Mandaic Letter

Citation Formats

General Reference

APA Style

BibTeX

Learn More
Att: The Mandaic Letter

Att is the ninth letter of the Mandaic alphabet and writes an emphatic t, one of the consonants that Semitic languages set apart from their plain counterparts by a secondary articulation further back in the mouth. It joins on both sides and takes a full set of four shapes according to where it falls in a run.

With the affrication mark beneath it the letter carries a further sound from outside the inherited set.

Att sits at the ninth place, where Aramaic has teth. The doubled t of its modern name keeps it apart in transliteration from at, the twenty-second letter, which writes the plain t. That doubling is a convention of the naming scheme rather than a fact about the letter: it says nothing about length or gemination, and the Mandaic script has a separate mark for gemination which is written with the letter and may be omitted.

The letters that join on both sides, att among them, carry a connected run onward, while the letters that join only to the right force the next letter to start a fresh one. Mandaic keeps the emphatic and plain pairs of its inherited alphabet in spelling in the same way its relatives do, so a word takes att or it takes at and the choice belongs to the root.

Cross-Tradition Connections

Article On

Sources
Comments (0)
No comments yet. Be the first to share a thought.
Reader Challenges (0 open reader challenges)
No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.

View At A Past Year

The atlas records no dated fact of its own for this entry, so there is no other year to choose.