The Syriac Abbreviation Mark is a

Unicode Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 Char ...

Control character In computing and telecommunications, a control character or non-printing character (NPC) is a code point in a character encoding, character set that does not represent a written Character (computing), character or symbol. They are used as in-ba ...

(U+070F) that forms part of the

Syriac script The Syriac alphabet ( ) is a writing system primarily used to write the Syriac language since the 1st century. It is one of the Semitic languages, Semitic abjads descending from the Aramaic alphabet through the Palmyrene alphabet, and shares sim ...

block. In Syriac, words are sometimes written in an abbreviated form, omitting some of the last letters. In such cases, a special

overline An overline, overscore, or overbar, is a typographical feature of a horizontal and vertical, horizontal line drawn immediately above the text. In old mathematical notation, an overline was called a ''vinculum (symbol), vinculum'', a notation fo ...

is drawn over some of the final letters of the abbreviated word. Traditionally, this overline has a point at each edge and a point in the middle, but sometimes a plain overline was used. Another use of this overline is to mark numbers: in Syriac numbers are written using numerical values which are assigned to letters (similarly to the

Gematria In numerology, gematria (; or , plural or ) is the practice of assigning a numerical value to a name, word, or phrase by reading it as a number, or sometimes by using an alphanumeric cipher. The letters of the alphabets involved have standar ...

system in

Hebrew Hebrew (; ''ʿÎbrit'') is a Northwest Semitic languages, Northwest Semitic language within the Afroasiatic languages, Afroasiatic language family. A regional dialect of the Canaanite languages, it was natively spoken by the Israelites and ...

). The sequence of letters used to write the number are also marked by the overline. To implement this special overline in Unicode, a special control character was conceived: the Syriac Abbreviation Mark (or SAM), described in section 9.3 of the Unicode Standard. It is inserted in the stream of characters just before the first letter which should be marked with the overline (visually, to the right of it, since Syriac is a right-to-left script).

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also has stch “feature tag” to pave the way of proper rendering. The rendering engine should put an overline on all subsequent Syriac script letters, until the first character which is not a Syriac letter or diacritic. However, several computer environments do not render this character correctly, but show rather a substitution

glyph A glyph ( ) is any kind of purposeful mark. In typography, a glyph is "the specific shape, design, or representation of a character". It is a particular graphical representation, in a particular typeface, of an element of written language. A ...

where it appears in the character stream. Here is an example containing the SAM, just after the Syriac letter Alaph (first letter to the right): ܐ܏ܒܓܕ The image below shows the correct way this should be rendered:

References

{{reflist Control characters Unicode Syriac alphabet

See also

References