Nun ࠍ

Nun is the fourteenth letter of the Samaritan alphabet and carries the numeral value fifty. It writes a plain n, and it is one of the few letters whose name the Samaritan and Hebrew traditions still share unchanged. The gloss usually given for that name, a fish, is a reconstruction from the word.

Grammatically it prefixes the first person plural of the imperfect verb, the we shall form, and it appears in a set of verbal endings and pronominal elements that make it common in ordinary prose. It also behaves in a way a reader has to know about. In the Semitic languages a nun at the end of a syllable frequently assimilates to the following consonant and disappears from the spelling, doubling that consonant instead. A word can therefore contain a nun that is not written, which is one of the standard difficulties in reading an unpointed text and one of the things a reading tradition carries.

In the square Hebrew script this letter has a final form; Samaritan has one shape. Greek took the sign as nu and Latin as N, both without change of sound.

The character is encoded at U+080D.

Nun is worth a note on the letter glosses generally. Almost every gloss in this alphabet, an ox for alaf, a house for bit, a door for dalat, is argued backwards from the letter name by modern scholars rather than recorded by anyone who wrote the script, and the atlas marks them as reconstructions. This letter is a partial exception. The word behind its name is an ordinary attested word for a fish in Aramaic, a language the community itself writes in these letters. That does not prove the letter was ever drawn as a fish, but the gloss rests on something the others do not.

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.