Sadhe ܨ

Sadhe is the eighteenth letter of the Syriac abjad, with the numeral value ninety. It writes an emphatic s, set apart from semkath by an articulation further back in the mouth in the same way that teth is set apart from taw. It joins only to the right, so the letter after it begins a new connected group.

Its name is the inherited Northwest Semitic word usually glossed as a fishhook. The gloss reconstructs a sign in the older linear alphabet rather than describing the Syriac shape, which is drawn quite differently in Estrangela, in Serto and in Madnhaya.

Sadhe is the last of the tens. The nine letters from yudh to sadhe carry ten, twenty, thirty and so on up to ninety, and the letter after sadhe opens the hundreds, so the eighteenth place is where the numbering of the alphabet turns over. Nothing in the shape or the sound marks that turn; it falls where it falls because the inherited order puts it there.

Being one of the eight letters that do not join to the letter following, sadhe breaks a word into more than one connected run, which is one of the cues a reader uses to segment a line of cursive Syriac before recognising any individual letter.

The fishhook gloss deserves a caution, and so do the ox, the house and the door behind the other names. They come from attempts to work out what the signs of the older linear alphabet depicted. Some of those identifications are secure and others are argued over, and the Syriac shapes offer no evidence either way, having descended through centuries of cursive writing in which any picture was lost long ago.

Syriac letters double as figures on a simple plan inherited with the alphabet. The first nine letters carry the units, one to nine. The next nine carry the tens, twenty to ninety, with yudh at ten. The last four carry the hundreds, one hundred to four hundred. Sadhe closes the second group at ninety, and qaph opens the third at one hundred.

The design has a consequence that is easy to miss: the alphabet runs out. Twenty-two letters reach four hundred and no further, so anything above that is written by combining letters, or by marking a letter to multiply its value. A mark below a letter serves for the multiplication. The system is workable rather than elegant, and it was never meant to carry arithmetic; it was meant to write down a number that has already been arrived at.

In practice it does that constantly in Syriac manuscripts. Scribes number the leaves and quires of a codex with it, which is what lets a book that has lost its binding be reassembled and a missing quire be identified as missing. Dates, chapter divisions and marginal references use it too.

The same scheme, with the same values at the same places, runs in Hebrew and, through the abjad order, in Arabic, because all three inherited it with the sequence. Comparing the three at the point where the tens end is one of the clearest demonstrations that the sequence itself is the thing being inherited.