Nun ܢ

Nun is the fourteenth letter of the Syriac abjad, with the numeral value fifty. It writes n, a voiced alveolar nasal. It joins on both sides and takes a distinct final form that descends below the line, which together with the tailed final kaph gives a Syriac line its lower landmarks.

Its name is the inherited Northwest Semitic word for a fish, and it holds the same fourteenth place in Hebrew.

Nun carries a great deal of Syriac grammar. The letter forms the prefix of the third person of the imperfect verb, so a very large share of the verbs in any Syriac text begin with it. That feature is one of the marks that separates Syriac and the eastern Aramaic dialects from the western Aramaic ones, which use a different prefix, and it is the sort of small grammatical fact by which a dialect is identified.

A reader therefore meets nun at the head of a word as often as inside one, and meets its descending final form at the end of a word constantly as well, since n closes many Syriac forms. Between the prefix and the ending, nun is among the most frequently written letters in the language, and its shape at the two ends of a word is quite different in each of the three hands.

Nun stands at the fourteenth place with the value fifty in Hebrew and in the Arabic abjad order as well, and its name is the word for a fish in both traditions that kept the old nouns. It is one of the correspondences that survives across all three alphabets without qualification, which is why it is a useful letter to start from when setting one Aramaic-descended alphabet beside another.

Aramaic is not one language. It is a family with a documented history of more than two and a half thousand years, divided by period and by region, and Syriac is one member of it: the Aramaic of Edessa, in Osrhoene, which became the literary and liturgical language of a large body of Christian writing.

What separates one Aramaic dialect from another is rarely dramatic. It is a set of small regularities of exactly the kind nun provides. Syriac and the other eastern dialects form the third person of the imperfect verb with a prefix written by nun; the western dialects use a different one. A reader who knows this can often place a text from a single verb.

That kind of evidence matters because the scripts do not sort themselves neatly by language. Syriac letters were used to write Arabic, in Garshuni; a reversed pe belongs to Christian Palestinian Aramaic, a separate dialect that took the Syriac letters over for its own use; Sogdian and Persian writers added marked letters to the same set. Script and language part company constantly in this region, so the language has to be identified from the language.

The atlas keeps them apart for the same reason. Syriac the alphabet is one entry, Classical Syriac the language another, and a letter belongs to the alphabet. What the letter does in the grammar, as nun does here, belongs to the letter as a fact about how it is used.