Gaman ࠂ

Gaman is the third letter of the Samaritan alphabet and carries the numeral value three. It writes a plain g, and its name is the inherited Northwest Semitic one that stands behind Hebrew gimel. The gloss usually attached to that name, a camel, is worked backwards from the word rather than recorded by any ancient writer, and the atlas marks it as a reconstruction.

The letter is written as a single free-standing shape. Samaritan letters never join, so gaman looks the same beside any neighbour, and the script has no cursive in the sense that Arabic does. It also has no final form, so the letter is identical wherever it stands in a word. Between them those two facts make Samaritan an unusually predictable script for a beginner: once you know twenty-two shapes you know every shape the script will show you, which is not true of Hebrew, Arabic or Greek.

Its afterlife outside the Semitic world is worth following. Greek took the sign as gamma. The Etruscans and then the Romans took it from Greek, and in Latin it settled as the letter C, which is why the Latin alphabet has C in third place where the Semitic and Greek alphabets have a g. The letter G was cut later out of C to restore the distinction that had been lost along the way. So the Samaritan third letter and the Latin third letter are the same inherited sign, with a change of sound in between.

The character is encoded at U+0802.

A page of Samaritan writing does not look like a page of square Hebrew, and the differences are structural rather than decorative. The script runs right to left. The letters stand apart and never join. There are no final forms, so the ends of words are not marked by the shapes of their letters. What marks them instead is a separator written between words, a practice inherited from the Paleo-Hebrew inscriptions, where a point or a short stroke divides one word from the next. The character standard encodes the Samaritan word separator along with a set of further marks used to divide clauses, verses and larger sections of text.

That is a real difference from the Greek and Coptic manuscript traditions, where early books were written in continuous script with no gaps at all and the reader was expected to find the word boundaries. It is also a difference from the modern printed page in Hebrew, where words are separated by space rather than by a written sign. A Samaritan text tells you where its words end, in ink, with a mark that is part of the writing system rather than an absence of one.

The overall impression is of a strongly horizontal script. The weight of each letter sits along the top of the line and the strokes below it are lighter, which gives a column of Samaritan text a continuous upper edge and a broken lower one. Anyone who has looked at Paleo-Hebrew epigraphy will recognise the ancestry of that look immediately, and anyone used to the square script will find it entirely unfamiliar.