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The Relative Pronoun 
- and the Pronominal Suffixes in Mandaic1
Harvard University
The enclitic pronominal suffixes in Neo-Mandaic are affixed to nouns and prepositions via two separate strategies. Nearly all nouns and prepositions inherited directly from Classical Mandaic take pronominal suffixes directly. All loanwords, and an extremely circumscribed set of original Mandaic words, receive pronominal suffixes after an enclitic particle, –d-. Rudolph Macuch suggested in his Handbook of Classical and Modern Mandaic that this particle is derived from the Classical Mandaic relative pronoun, 
-. The evidence, however, suggests that this particle is an innovation, which ultimately derives from the metathesis of the final two root consonants of Classical Mandaic qam / qadmia ‘to, for’ (Neo-Mandaic qam / qamdi-), from which it spread by analogy to new lexical items.
This article is based upon a paper first delivered at the Harvard Semitic Philology Workshop in November of 2004. I am particularly indebted to Prof. John Huehnergard, Prof. Wolfhart P. Heinrichs and Na’ama Pat-El for the advice they have provided through multiple drafts of this paper
Transcriptions of Classical Mandaic words follow the system first proposed by E.S. Drower and Rudoft Macuch, A Mandaic Dictionary (Oxford 1963), xii, and transcriptions of Neo-Mandaic words follow the phonemic orthography devised by the author for his forthcoming dissertation on the Neo-Mandaic dialect of Khorramshahr, Iran.