The Samaritan alphabet is used by the Samaritan

Samaritan

The Samaritans are an ethnoreligious group of the Levant. Religiously, they are the adherents to Samaritanism, an Abrahamic religion closely related to Judaism...

s for religious writings, including the Samaritan Pentateuch

Samaritan Pentateuch

The Samaritan Pentateuch, sometimes called Samaritan Torah, , is a version of the Hebrew language Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible, used by the Samaritans....

, writings in Samaritan Hebrew, and for commentaries and translations in Samaritan Aramaic

Samaritan Aramaic language

Samaritan Aramaic, or Samaritan, is the dialect of Aramaic used by the Samaritans in their sacred and scholarly literature. This should not be confused with the Samaritan Hebrew language of the Scriptures...

 and occasionally Arabic

Arabic language

Arabic is a name applied to the descendants of the Classical Arabic language of the 6th century AD, used most prominently in the Quran, the Islamic Holy Book...

.

Samaritan is a direct descendant of the Paleo-Hebrew alphabet

Paleo-Hebrew alphabet

The Paleo-Hebrew alphabet , is an abjad offshoot of the ancient Semitic alphabet, identical to the Phoenician alphabet. At the very least it dates to the 10th century BCE...

, which was a variety of the Phoenician alphabet

Phoenician alphabet

The Phoenician alphabet, called by convention the Proto-Canaanite alphabet for inscriptions older than around 1050 BC, was a non-pictographic consonantal alphabet, or abjad. It was used for the writing of Phoenician, a Northern Semitic language, used by the civilization of Phoenicia...

 in which large parts of the Hebrew Bible

Hebrew Bible

The Hebrew Bible is a term used by biblical scholars outside of Judaism to refer to the Tanakh , a canonical collection of Jewish texts, and the common textual antecedent of the several canonical editions of the Christian Old Testament...

 were originally penned. That script was used by the ancient Israelites, both Jews

Jews

The Jews , also known as the Jewish people, are a nation and ethnoreligious group originating in the Israelites or Hebrews of the Ancient Near East. The Jewish ethnicity, nationality, and religion are strongly interrelated, as Judaism is the traditional faith of the Jewish nation...

 and Samaritans. The better-known "square script" Hebrew alphabet

Hebrew alphabet

The Hebrew alphabet , known variously by scholars as the Jewish script, square script, block script, or more historically, the Assyrian script, is used in the writing of the Hebrew language, as well as other Jewish languages, most notably Yiddish, Ladino, and Judeo-Arabic. There have been two...

 traditionally used by Jews is a stylized version of the Aramaic alphabet

Aramaic alphabet

The Aramaic alphabet is adapted from the Phoenician alphabet and became distinctive from it by the 8th century BC. The letters all represent consonants, some of which are matres lectionis, which also indicate long vowels....

 which they adopted from the Persian Empire (which in turn was adopted from the Arameans). After the fall of the Persian Empire, Judaism used both scripts before settling on the Aramaic form. For a limited time thereafter, the use of paleo-Hebrew (proto-Samaritan) among Jews was retained only to write the Tetragrammaton

Tetragrammaton

The term Tetragrammaton refers to the name of the God of Israel YHWH used in the Hebrew Bible.-Hebrew Bible:...

, but soon that custom was also abandoned.

Development

The table at left shows the development of the Samaritan script. At left are the corresponding Hebrew letters for comparison. Column I is the Paleo-Hebrew alphabet

Paleo-Hebrew alphabet

The Paleo-Hebrew alphabet , is an abjad offshoot of the ancient Semitic alphabet, identical to the Phoenician alphabet. At the very least it dates to the 10th century BCE...

. Column X shows the modern form of the letters.

Letters

Consonants

ā'lāf

bīt

gā'mān

dā'lāt

īy

bâ

zēn

īt

ţīt

yūt

kâf

lā'bāt

mīm

nūn

sin'gât

īn

fī

şâ'dīy

qūf

rīš

šān

tāf

Vowels

ā'lāf

occlusion

dagesh

epenthetic yūt

epenthetic yût

ē

e

â

ā

a

æ̂

ǣ

æ

ă

ă

ū

u

î

ī

i

o

sukun

Punctuation

Unicode

Samaritan script was added to the Unicode

Unicode

Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems...

Standard in October, 2009 with the release of version 5.2.

The Unicode block for Samaritan is U+0800–U+083F:

External links

• A Samaritan Bible, at the British library
• Omniglot.com - Samaritan alphabet
• Link to free Samaritan font (consonants only as of 2010)