Neo-Mandaic

Notable features

• vowels and some consonants represent more than one phoneme
• diacritics can disambiguate phonemes in educational texts
• some short vowels are elided in the text
• the alphabet has 24 letters because that is a significant number in Mandaean, but to reach that number the alphabet includes a ligature and the first letter is repeated at the end of the alphabet.

Letters

Combining marks

Punctuation

Other

Vowel sounds

Consonant sounds

	labial	dental	alveolar	post- alveolar	palatal	velar	uvular	pharyngeal	glottal
stop	p b		t d			k ɡ	q
ejectives		ðˤ	tˤ
affricate				t͡ʃ d͡ʒ
fricative	f v	θ ð	s z sˤ zˤ	ʃ ʒ		ɣ	χ ʁ	ħ ʕ	h
nasal	m		n
approximant	w		l		j
trill/flap			r

Tone

Neo-Mandaic is not a tonal language.

Structure

tbd

Vowel summary table

This table only summarises basic vowel to character assignments.

The table shows only phonemic vowels, unless indicated otherwise. These vowels represent a variety of allophones – see vrange for more information. Hyphens are used to indicate word-initial or word-final forms. The right-hand column shows where the vocalisation mark can be used in educational texts to disambiguate the vowel sound.

For additional details see vowel_mappings.

Post-consonant vowels

Vowels that follow consonants are written using 4 vowel letters, derived from consonants. The 4 vowel letters represent 6 phonemes, and various allophonic realisations depending on syllabic context or speaker location (see phonemesV). A seventh phoneme, ə, is unwritten.

Three of the 4 letters representing vowel sounds may represent one of two phonemes; the specific phoneme can be clarified for educational purposes using 085A.

Vowel ranges

fig_vowel_cloud shows how 3 of the vowel letters encompass a range of sounds, rather than representing a single, specific sound. The 6 darker phones within the circles are phonemic vowel distinctions, whereas the lighter phones are allophonic realisations. In each circled case, two primary vowel sounds are associated with a given letter. There can also be long and short versions of the primary vowels.

Observation: Need to confirm that ɛ falls within 2 circles.

Standalone vowels

Standalone vowels only occur in word-initial position in Neo-Mandaich,72. Two of the vowel letters are commonly preceded by ࡏ in word-initial position. That letter on its own represents an e sound, however Danielsd,512 says that this usually represents a prothetic vowel before the t-prefix in passive verbs or before a monoconsonantal word.

Observation: Does 084F on its own therefore represent the vowel ə rather than one of the sounds covered by the 0849 range?

This gives the following typical forms:

Examples:

ࡏࡉࡍࡂࡋࡉࡆࡉࡀ

ࡏࡅࡓࡀࡔࡋࡀࡌ

ࡏࡕࡌࡀࡋ

ࡀࡌࡀࡉ

Vowel absence

As for most alphabets, Mandaic has no special way of indicating that a vowel doesn't occur between two consonants. The two consonants are simply written together, eg.

ࡊࡋࡀࡕࡀ

ࡉࡀࡄࡓࡀ

ࡖࡍࡐࡀࡒࡕ

Vowel sounds to characters

Consonant summary table

This table only summarises basic consonant to character assignments.

The right-hand column lists sounds that only occur in words from other languages, principally Arabic or Persian.

For additional details see consonant_mappings.

Basic consonants

Native Mandaic sounds include 26 basic consonants (see consonantSummary). They are written using the following consonant letters. (The pronunciations in the list below show only native sounds.)

Click on each letter for more details and for examples of usage, especially where more than one sound is indicated.

Repertoire extension

Neo-Mandaic is heavily influenced by Arabic and Persian languages, and they can bring additional sounds into the text via loan words or dialectal variations. Mostly, the non-native sounds are written using ordinary Mandaic letters, but diacritics can be used to point out particular pronunciations (see Cdisambuators). The list below shows the main non-native sounds and the letters used to write them.

This list includes one special letter that was added to the repertoire. ࡘ is borrowed from ع U+0639 ARABIC LETTER AIN to represent the Arabic sound ʕ.

Consonant disambiguator

0859 can be used to disambiguate letter sounds in educational texts, two of which sounds are typically used only in loan words (with asterisks).

For example, compare:

ࡑࡅࡐࡓࡀ

ࡑࡅࡐ࡙ࡓࡀ

Also, although gemination is not usually marked, 085B can be used to indicate gemination of a consonant and what is referred to by native writers as 'hard' pronunciation. See clength.

Observation: It's not clear from the sources whether this means that the gemination marker can be used to indicate gemination but can also be used to indicate 'hard' sounds in the sense used in the comparison table above, where 'hard' is contrasted with 'soft'. The examples given in the sources all show gemination, implying that gemination is referred to as 'hard pronunciation'.

Special characters

ࡇ ẖ only appears at the end of personal names or at the end of words to indicate the third person singular suffix.

ࡖ is a letter of the alphabet, but it has a morphemic function, being used to write the relative pronoun and genitive exponent ḏ-, eg.

ࡖࡍࡐࡀࡒࡕ

ࡖࡎࡉࡍࡀ

ࡗ is used to write the word

ࡗ

It was derived from the digraph ࡊࡖ.

Consonant clusters

Häberlh,729 provides some detailed information about rules for consonant clusters.

Consonant length

Gemination occurs in Neo-Mandaic words, but is not usually marked.

In educational texts 085B can be used to indicate gemination of a consonant.

ࡋࡉࡁ࡛ࡀ

ࡀࡊ࡛ࡀ

Geminated ࡕ is pronounced χt.h,728

Consonant sounds to characters

Managing text direction

Unicode provides a set of 10 formatting characters that can be used to control the direction of text when displayed. These characters have no visual form in the rendered text, however text editing applications may have a way to show their location.

202B (RLE), 202A (LRE), and 202C (PDF) are in widespread use to set the base direction of a range of characters. RLE/LRE comes at the start, and PDF at the end of a range of characters for which the base direction is to be set.

In Unicode 6.1, the Unicode Standard added a set of characters which do the same thing but also isolate the content from surrounding characters, in order to avoid spillover effects. They are 2067 (RLI), 2066 (LRI), and 2066 (PDI). The Unicode Standard recommends that these be used instead.

There is also 2068 (FSI), used initially to set the base direction according to the first recognised strongly-directional character.

061C (ALM) is used to produce correct sequencing of numeric data. Click on the character name, and see also expressions for details.

200F (RLM) and 200E (LRM) are invisible characters with strong directional properties that are also sometimes used to produce the correct ordering of text.

For more information about how to use these formatting characters see How to use Unicode controls for bidi text. Note, however, that when writing HTML you should generally use markup rather than these control codes. For information about that, see Creating HTML Pages in Arabic, Hebrew and Other Right-to-left Scripts.

Cursive text

Mandaic is cursive, ie. letters in a word are joined up. Fonts need to produce the appropriate joining form for a code point, according to its visual context.

The cursive treatment doesn't produce significant variations of the essential part of a rendered character (unlike Arabic). In some letters, the joining edge of the glyph adapts to join with an adjacent character. Two examples show how strokes away from the baseline are typically shortened to create joining shapes.

Other small adaptations may occur between certain adjacent characters, such as kl, wt and mn.d,512

Context-based shaping & positioning

In addition to the cursive shaping described just above, the position of diacritics may vary according to whether or not the glyph of the base character extends below the baseline. The diacritic also needs to be positioned horizontally underneath the character in the appropriate place. Several such variations are shown here:

The 3 combining marks found in Neo-Mandaic are normally only used for educational texts.

Word boundaries

Words are separated by spaces.

Graphemes

Phrase & section boundaries

Mandaic uses sentence punctuation sparselye. ࡞ is used to start and end text sections. Everson describes a smaller version of this symbol that is used like a comma.e There is no Unicode character for the smaller version.

The smaller size is also used in colophons (historical lay text added to religious text).d,512

The translation of the UDHR uses ASCII full stop at the end of a sentence.

Observation: The keyboard at MandeanNetwork.com suggests that writers of Mandaic use Arabic punctuation, such as the following, in addition to western punctuation such as colon, full stop, etc. This is TBC.

Mirrored characters

The words 'left' and 'right' in the Unicode names for parentheses, brackets, and other paired characters should be ignored. LEFT should be read as if it said START, and RIGHT as END. The direction in which the glyphs point will be automatically determined according to the base direction of the text.

The number of characters that are mirrored in this way is around 550, most of which are mathematical symbols. Some are single characters, rather than pairs. The following are some of the more common ones.

(␣)␣<␣>␣[␣]␣{␣}␣«␣»␣‹␣›

Quotations & citations

Observation: The keyboard at MandeanNetwork.com suggests that writers of Mandaic use the following. This is TBC.

Line breaking

Lines usually break between words.

Show (default) line-breaking properties for characters in the modern Mandaic orthography.

Text alignment & justification

When text is fully justified the baseline may be stretched, as in Arabic. The Unicode Standard saysu that ـ may be used to achieve that effect, however this is not a good solution in text where the line width varies, eg. in a web browser whose window can be stretched. (The reason being that as the paragraphs reflow words will wrap into different positions on the line.)

The following reflect justification practices observed in the (handwritten) text Das Johannesbuch der Mandäer.

The whole document is justified on both sides of the text. In many cases the final word is stretched internally to make the line fit the width of the available space. Only rarely are words earlier in the line stretched.

A difference from Arabic is that many lines are stretched to the end of the available space by a trailing baseline extension. The choice of internal vs trailing extension appears to be related to the character at the end of the word.

On a good number of lines, final letters in a word appear to be squeezed onto the line by writing them above the preceding part of the line. A short example can be seen in fig_justification_hr.

Another notable feature is the use of a 'rule' such as ࡎـــــࡀ U+084E MANDAIC LETTER AS + baseline extension + U+0840 MANDAIC LETTER HALQA, where the baseline extension can cause the combination to span all or a large part of the line. In some cases, the letter ࡔ or ࡄ may appear at the midpoint of the rule. If this combination doesn't fill a whole line, it appears at the end of a line and is long enough to fill the remaining space.

Further research is needed to ascertain whether these justification techniques are generally applicable to Mandaic text, rather than unique to this document.

Daniels saysd that 0847 can sometimes be 'manipulated calligraphically in an otherwise pedestrian manuscript in order to fill out a line'.

Baselines, line height, etc.

Mandaic uses the so-called 'alphabetic' baseline, which is the same as for Latin and many other scripts.

A few Mandaic characters have glyphs that rise above the main height, and a few more that descend below the baseline. Diacritics are attached below the letters.

To give an approximate idea, fig_baselines compares Latin and Mandaic glyphs from the Noto font. Many Mandaic letters are less high than the Latin x-height, however some extend well below the Latin descenders, especially when they have combining marks attached. A few character glyphs reach the Latin cap-height.

General page layout & progression

Mandaic books, leaflets, etc., are bound on the right-hand side, and pages progress from right to left.

Columns are vertical but run right-to-left across the page.