In ࠏ

In is the sixteenth letter of the Samaritan alphabet and carries the numeral value seventy. It stands where Hebrew has ayin, and it is the fourth and last of the throat letters whose consonants have weakened in the Samaritan reading tradition, which is why the letter name is In.

The consonant it once wrote is one of the hardest in the Semitic inventory for an outsider to hear or to make, a constriction deep in the throat for which English has no equivalent. Like it and zen, this letter carries more than one sound of the ancestor language, and the second one is preserved in Arabic with a letter of its own.

There is a well known piece of evidence for that merger, and it comes from Greek. When the Hebrew scriptures were translated into Greek, the translators sometimes rendered this letter with a g in a proper name, which makes no sense if the letter wrote only the sound it writes in later Hebrew, and complete sense if the older second sound was still audible in some words at the time. The name Gomorrah, which begins with this letter in Hebrew and with a g in Greek, is the standard example. It is a small thing and it is decisive, and it shows how a translation into another script can preserve information the original script had already stopped recording.

The character is encoded at U+080F.

The letters the Samaritan script continues had a public life outside the manuscript tradition, and some of the best evidence for them is not on parchment at all. Paleo-Hebrew forms are cut into stone in Israelite inscriptions of the Iron Age, they are written on ostraca, the potsherds used for notes and receipts, and they were struck on coinage.

The coinage is the striking case, because it comes long after the script had been superseded for ordinary use. Jewish coins of the Hasmonean period, and again of the revolts against Rome, carry legends in Paleo-Hebrew letters at a time when everyday Hebrew and Aramaic were being written in the square script. The old letters were chosen deliberately, for what they signified rather than for convenience. Something similar appears in the Dead Sea Scrolls, where a scroll otherwise written in the square script can write the divine name in Paleo-Hebrew characters, marking it out from the text around it.

That gives the Samaritan script an unusual double status. The same letterforms that one community was using archaically, as a deliberate reach backwards, another community was using as its ordinary writing and has gone on using ever since. Excavation on Mount Gerizim has produced inscriptions in these letters from the sanctuary there, which anchors the script in the same landscape where the community still lives and closes some of the distance between the epigraphy and the living hand.