Samaritan alphabet

Samaritan alphabet
Type	Abjad
Languages	Samaritan Hebrew, Samaritan Aramaic
Time period	600 BCE – present
Parent systems	Egyptian hieroglyphs [1] Proto-Sinaitic alphabet Phoenician alphabet Paleo-Hebrew alphabet Samaritan alphabet
Direction	Right-to-left
ISO 15924	Samr, 123
Unicode alias	Samaritan
Unicode range	U+0800–U+083F

The Samaritan alphabet is used by the Samaritans for religious writings, including the Samaritan Pentateuch, writings in Samaritan Hebrew, and for commentaries and translations in Samaritan Aramaic and occasionally Arabic.

Samaritan is a direct descendant of the Paleo-Hebrew alphabet, which was a variety of the Phoenician alphabet in which large parts of the Hebrew Bible were originally penned. All these scripts are believed to be descendants of the Proto-Sinaitic script. That script was used by the ancient Israelites, both Jews and Samaritans. The better-known "square script" Hebrew alphabet traditionally used by Jews is a stylized version of the Aramaic alphabet which they adopted from the Persian Empire (which in turn adopted it from the Arameans). After the fall of the Persian Empire, Judaism used both scripts before settling on the Aramaic form. For a limited time thereafter, the use of paleo-Hebrew (proto-Samaritan) among Jews was retained only to write the Tetragrammaton, but soon that custom was also abandoned.

The Samaritan alphabet first became known to the Western world with the publication of a manuscript of the Samaritan Pentateuch in 1631 by Jean Morin.^[2] 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 Parisian library.^[3]

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.

The development of the Samaritan script

Letters

Ancient inscription in Samaritan Hebrew. From a photo c.1900 by the Palestine Exploration Fund.

Unicode

Samaritan script was added to the Unicode Standard in October 2009 with the release of version 5.2.

The Unicode block for Samaritan is U+0800–U+083F:

Notes

Bibliography

• Flôrenṭîn, Moše (2005). Late Samaritan Hebrew: A Linguistic Analysis Of Its Different Types. BRILL. ISBN 9789004138414. 

External links

• A Samaritan Bible, at the British library
• Omniglot.com - Samaritan alphabet
• Link to free Samaritan font (consonants only as of 2010)