Singaat: The Samaritan Letter in the Place of Hebrew Samekh

Singaat is the fifteenth letter of the Samaritan alphabet and carries the numeral value sixty. It writes a plain s. Its name is the least obviously related of the twenty-two to its Hebrew counterpart, samekh, which is a reminder that letter names travelled with the signs and were reshaped by the mouths of the people using them, while the position in the sequence and the numeral value did not move at all.

The letter is among the less frequent in the alphabet. Hebrew and its relatives have more than one way of writing an s sound, and the distribution between them is a matter of the history of each individual word rather than of any rule a reader can apply, so singaat turns up in a limited stock of vocabulary and is absent from long stretches of text. That scarcity is itself useful to a palaeographer. A letter that appears rarely gives fewer chances to date a hand, and its form in a manuscript is correspondingly more valuable when it does appear.

Greek took the sign for xi and gave it the cluster ks, a sound the Semitic letter never wrote. That is one of several places where Greek fitted a borrowed sign to a sound of its own rather than to the sound it came with.

The character is encoded at U+080E.