Samaritan alphabet

Samaritan alphabet
Type	Abjad
Languages	Samaritan Hebrew, Samaritan Aramaic
Time period	600 BCE–present
Parent systems	Proto-Sinaitic alphabet Phoenician alphabet Paleo-Hebrew alphabet Samaritan alphabet
ISO 15924	Samr, 123
Direction	Right-to-left
Unicode alias	Samaritan
Unicode range	U+0800–U+083F
Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols.

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. 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 was adopted 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.

Development

The development of the Samaritan script

The table at left shows the development of the Samaritan script. At 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

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

External links

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