Samaritan Hebrew alphabet
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The Samaritan script is used by the Samaritans for religious writings, including the
Samaritan Pentateuch The Samaritan Torah ( Samaritan Hebrew: , ''Tōrāʾ''), also called the Samaritan Pentateuch, is a text of the Torah written in the Samaritan script and used as sacred scripture by the Samaritans. It dates back to one of the ancient versio ...
, writings in Samaritan Hebrew, and for commentaries and translations in Samaritan Aramaic and occasionally
Arabic Arabic (, ' ; , ' or ) is a Semitic language spoken primarily across the Arab world.Semitic languages: an international handbook / edited by Stefan Weninger; in collaboration with Geoffrey Khan, Michael P. Streck, Janet C. E.Watson; Walter ...
. Samaritan is a direct descendant of the Paleo-Hebrew alphabet, which was a variety of the
Phoenician alphabet The Phoenician alphabet is an alphabet (more specifically, an abjad) known in modern times from the Canaanite and Aramaic inscriptions found across the Mediterranean region. The name comes from the Phoenician civilization. The Phoenician a ...
. Paleo-Hebrew is the alphabet in which large parts of the
Hebrew Bible The Hebrew Bible or Tanakh (;"Tanach"
'' Proto-Sinaitic script Proto-Sinaitic (also referred to as Sinaitic, Proto-Canaanite when found in Canaan, the North Semitic alphabet, or Early Alphabetic) is considered the earliest trace of alphabetic writing and the common ancestor of both the Ancient South Arabian ...
. Paleo-Hebrew script was used by the ancient
Israelites The Israelites (; , , ) were a group of Semitic-speaking tribes in the ancient Near East who, during the Iron Age, inhabited a part of Canaan. The earliest recorded evidence of a people by the name of Israel appears in the Merneptah Stele o ...
, both
Jews Jews ( he, יְהוּדִים, , ) or Jewish people are an ethnoreligious group and nation originating from the Israelites Israelite origins and kingdom: "The first act in the long drama of Jewish history is the age of the Israelites""The ...
and Samaritans. The better-known "square script"
Hebrew alphabet The Hebrew alphabet ( he, אָלֶף־בֵּית עִבְרִי, ), known variously by scholars as the Ktav Ashuri, Jewish script, square script and block script, is an abjad script used in the writing of the Hebrew language and other Jewi ...
which has been traditionally used by Jews since the Babylonian exile is a stylized version of the Aramaic alphabet called Ashurit (כתב אשורי), though religious literalist interpretations of assume that the text asserts that it was received on Sinai from the
Finger of God The "finger of God" ( ''’etsba‘ ’Ĕlōhîm'') is a phrase used in the Bible. In Exodus 8:16–20 it is used during the plagues of Egypt by the Egyptian magicians. In Exodus 31:18 and Deuteronomy 9:10 it refers to the method by which the T ...
and that it has been in continuous and unchanged use since then. Historically, the Aramaic alphabet became distinct from Phoenician/Paleo-Hebrew in the 8th century. After the fall of the Persian Empire, Judaism used both scripts before settling on the Aramaic form, henceforth de facto becoming the “Hebrew alphabet” since it was repurposed to write Hebrew. For a limited time thereafter, the use of paleo-Hebrew (proto-Samaritan) among Jews was retained only to write the
Tetragrammaton The Tetragrammaton (; ), or Tetragram, is the four-letter Hebrew theonym (transliterated as YHWH), the name of God in the Hebrew Bible. The four letters, written and read from right to left (in Hebrew), are ''yodh'', '' he'', '' waw'', and ...
, but soon that custom was also abandoned. A cursive style of the alphabet also exists. The Samaritan alphabet first became known to the Western world with the publication of a manuscript of the
Samaritan Pentateuch The Samaritan Torah ( Samaritan Hebrew: , ''Tōrāʾ''), also called the Samaritan Pentateuch, is a text of the Torah written in the Samaritan script and used as sacred scripture by the Samaritans. It dates back to one of the ancient versio ...
in 1631 by Jean Morin.Exercitationes ecclesiasticae in utrumque Samaritanorum Pentateuchum
1631 In 1616 the traveler Pietro della Valle had purchased a copy of the text in Damascus, and this manuscript, now known as Codex B, was deposited in a
Paris Paris () is the Capital city, capital and List of communes in France with over 20,000 inhabitants, most populous city of France, with an estimated population of 2,165,423 residents in 2019 in an area of more than 105 km² (41 sq mi), ma ...
ian library.


Development

The table below shows the development of the Samaritan script. On the left are the corresponding Hebrew letters for comparison. Column I is the Paleo-Hebrew alphabet. Column X shows the modern form of the letters.


Letters

Consonants :   ā'lāf :   bīt :   gā'mān :   dā'lāt :   īy :   bā̊ :   zēn :   īt :   ṭīt :   yūt :   kā̊f :   lā'bāt :   mīm :   nūn :   sin'gā̊t :   īn :   fī :   ṣā̊'dīy :   qūf :   rīš :   šān :   tā̊f Vowels : :   ā'lāf :    ''occlusion'' :  
dagesh The dagesh () is a diacritic used in the Hebrew alphabet. It was added to the Hebrew orthography at the same time as the Masoretic system of niqqud (vowel points). It takes the form of a dot placed inside a Hebrew letter and has the effect of modi ...
:   epenthetic yūt :   epenthetic yût :   ē :   e/ə :   ā̊ː :   ā̊ :   å :   āː :   ā :   a :   ă :   ă :   ū :   u :   î :   ī :   i :   ō :  
sukun The Arabic script has numerous diacritics, which include: consonant pointing known as (), and supplementary diacritics known as (). The latter include the vowel marks termed (; singular: , '). The Arabic script is a modified abjad, where sh ...
Punctuation : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : :


Unicode

Samaritan script was added to the
Unicode Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, wh ...
Standard in October 2009 with the release of version 5.2. The Unicode block for Samaritan is U+0800–U+083F:


See also

*
Samaritan vocalization The Samaritan vocalization (or Samaritan pointing, Samaritan niqqud, he, ניקוד שומרוני) is a system of diacritics used with the Samaritan script to indicate vowel quality and gemination which reflects Samaritan Hebrew. It is used ...
*
Samaritan source Samaritan source (⅏) is a symbol used in classical studies to indicate that a referenced textual source is written with the Samaritan script. This character is encoded in Unicode as in the Letterlike Symbols Letterlike Symbols is a Unicod ...
sign


References


Bibliography

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External links


A Samaritan Bible, at the British library
(consonants only as of 2010) {{list of writing systems Abjad writing systems Canaanite writing systems Hebrew language Samaritan culture and history Semitic writing systems Right-to-left writing systems