Divinity Atlas

Sacred Correspondences
Articles

Samaritan in the Character Standard

Citation Formats

General Reference

APA Style

BibTeX

Learn More
Samaritan in the Character Standard

The Samaritan script has its own block in the international character standard, and everything the script needs is in it: the twenty-two letters in their inherited order, the marks used for vowels and for reading, and the punctuation used to divide words, clauses and sections. The letters run consecutively from the first code point in the block, so alaf, bit, gaman and the rest sit in the sequence the community teaches, and a program can walk the alphabet by counting.

Two decisions in that encoding are worth noticing, because they are decisions rather than defaults. The letters are named for the Samaritan reading, so the sixth is Baa and the seventeenth is Fi, rather than being given the Hebrew names a Hebraist would use for the equivalent signs. And the script is encoded in its own right rather than as a stylistic variant of Hebrew, which is the correct call and not an obvious one, since a font could in principle draw Hebrew code points in Samaritan shapes. Doing that would assert that the two are one script written two ways, which is precisely the confusion this alphabet suffers from most.

The practical effect is that Samaritan text can be typed, searched, sorted and published like any other, and that a Samaritan word in a catalogue is a Samaritan word rather than a Hebrew word in disguise. For a community of this size, having the script properly encoded is not a technicality. It is the difference between being able to use the script on a screen and having to make a picture of it.

Cross-Tradition Connections

Article On

Sources
Comments (0)
No comments yet. Be the first to share a thought.
Reader Challenges (0 open reader challenges)
No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.

View At A Past Year

The atlas records no dated fact of its own for this entry, so there is no other year to choose.