Yut ࠉ

Yut is the tenth letter of the Samaritan alphabet, the first of the tens, and carries the numeral value ten. It writes the semivowel y. The name is the inherited Northwest Semitic one behind Hebrew yod, and the gloss usually given for it, a hand, is a reconstruction from the word.

Its grammatical load is heavy. Yut prefixes the third person masculine of the imperfect verb, so it opens a large share of the verbs in any narrative passage; suffixed to a noun it marks the first person possessive; and it is one of the letters used as a vowel marker inside a word, standing for the i and e vowels in unpointed text. That last role is what makes an unpointed Semitic text readable at all, and it is why the same twenty-two letters can carry a language with a rich vowel system.

In the square Hebrew script the corresponding letter is the smallest sign in the alphabet, small enough that its name, by way of Greek iota, became an English byword for the least possible amount. The Samaritan letterform belongs to a different line and does not carry that reputation, but the Greek letter that inherited the sign, iota, is the same one, in the same tenth position, with the same numeral value.

The character is encoded at U+0809.

The twenty-two letters are consonants, and a Torah scroll is written with consonants alone. That does not mean the Samaritan tradition has no way of writing vowels. Over the manuscript centuries it developed a set of marks placed above and below the letters, used in books other than scrolls to record features of the reading that the consonantal text leaves out. They are diacritics rather than letters: the community counts twenty-two letters, and the marks are not among them.

The set is distinct from the Tiberian pointing familiar from Jewish bibles, and it is not a borrowing of it. It grew out of the Samaritan reading tradition and records that reading, so a pointed Samaritan manuscript is a written trace of how the community recited the text at the time and place the manuscript was made. The character standard encodes the marks separately from the letters for exactly this reason, and one of them is named after this letter, a sign for a y sound inserted in reading that the consonantal text does not write.

For anyone working with the manuscripts the practical value is high. Pointing is the only way a reading tradition leaves a dated record of itself, and comparing the marks in manuscripts of different periods is one of the few ways to test whether and where the recitation has shifted. For a reader of a scroll it changes nothing, because the scroll carries none of it and the recitation is learned from a teacher.