Baa ࠅ

Baa is the sixth letter of the Samaritan alphabet and carries the numeral value six. It stands where Hebrew has vav, and its name records the fact that the Samaritan reading tradition sounds this letter as b rather than as w, which is why the standard character name for it is Baa and not Waw.

By any measure of use it is one of the two or three most important letters in the script. Prefixed to a word it is the conjunction and, and Hebrew narrative prose is built out of clauses strung together with it, so the letter appears at the head of an enormous proportion of the sentences in the Torah. Inside a word it does duty as a vowel letter for the u and o vowels, which is a second job entirely, and one that unpointed Semitic writing depends on to be readable.

Greek used this sign twice over. It kept it in sixth place as digamma, a letter for the w sound that dropped out of the Greek alphabet as the sound itself disappeared from the language, though it survived as a numeral. And it took the sign again, reshaped, and placed it at the end of the sequence as upsilon, a vowel. The Latin letters F, U, V, W and Y all trace back through one or other of those two branches, so a single Samaritan letter stands at the head of five modern ones.

The character is encoded at U+0805.

Two of the twenty-two Samaritan letters are named for a sound that is not the sound their Hebrew counterparts write. The sixth is Baa where Hebrew has vav, and the seventeenth is Fi where Hebrew has pe. Four more, Alaf, Iy, It and In, are named in a form that has lost the throat consonant the letter was made for. Nothing about the writing changed in any of those cases. The letters are the same letters, in the same positions, with the same numeral values; what changed is how the community says them.

That is worth stating plainly because letter names are usually treated as fossils, inherited words that carry no information about the people using them. In this alphabet they carry a good deal. They are the names the Samaritan community teaches, and they were adopted for the letters in the international character standard, so the encoded names of the script are the community reading rather than a Hebraist transliteration. Anyone comparing a Samaritan alphabet chart with a Hebrew one and expecting the names to match will find six that do not, and every one of the six is telling them something true.

The general shape of the phenomenon is ordinary. A script is conservative and a spoken tradition is not, so over enough centuries the two come apart, and the letter names sit in between recording where the seam is. What is unusual here is that the reading tradition is still being spoken, so the seam can be examined rather than inferred.