the dialects that have thus far been documented, only Neo-Mandaic can be described with any certainty as the modern reflex of any classical written form of Aramaic. History of scholarship The first attempt at documenting Neo-Mandaic, a polyglot glossary including a column of lexical items from the Neo-Mandaic dialect of Basra, was produced roughly 350 years ago by a Carmelite missionary whom Borghero has identified with the Discalced Carmelite . This Glossarium was to have a perennial influence upon subsequent generations of Mandaeologists; it was consulted by Theodor Nöldeke and Rudolf Macúch in the preparation of their grammars, and the contents of its Neo-Mandaic column were incorporated into Drower and Macuch's 1963 dictionary. No complete Neo-Mandaic text was published until the beginning of the twentieth century, when de Morgan published five documents collected in Iran (transliterated and translated by Macuch). The last few decades have seen a marked increase in the number of Neo-Mandaic texts available to scholarship (Macuch 1965b, 1989, and 1993) and a descriptive grammar (Häberl 2009). Writing system Neo-Mandaic is generally unwritten. On the rare occasions on which it is written, in personal letters and in the colophons that are attached to manuscripts, it is rendered using a modified version of the classical script. With the exception of , all vowels are represented, but without any indication of length or quality. The letter ʕ consistently represents an epenthetic vowel, either or . Additionally, the Arabic letter has been borrowed to indicate the voiced pharyngeal fricative as well as the glottal stop. The letters b, g, k, p, and t may represent stops ( and ) or fricatives ( and ). Formerly the fricatives were not distinctive segments but merely allophones of the stops after a vowel; the sound rule governing this alternation is now defunct. Neo-Mandaic orthography differs from that of Classical Mandaic by using u to represent even when it is a reflex of Classical Mandaic b. As Neo-Mandaic contains several phonemes not found in Classical Mandaic, several letters from the original script have been modified with two dots placed below to represent these phonemes: š may represent , d represents , and h represents . The private Mandaic schools in Iran and Australia employ a version of this same script with a few further pedagogic modifications. Phonology There are 35 distinctive segments in Neo-Mandaic: 28 consonants and seven vowels. For most of these segments, there