Labat ࠋ

Labat is the twelfth letter of the Samaritan alphabet and carries the numeral value thirty. It writes a plain l. The name is the inherited Northwest Semitic one behind Hebrew lamed, glossed as an ox goad, a reading reconstructed from the word rather than recorded by anyone using the script.

Labat is the second of the three single letter prepositions, the one meaning to or for, and it is also the marker of the infinitive, so it stands at the front of an enormous number of words. In a text of any length it will be among the commonest letters on the page for grammatical reasons alone, before any question of the sounds of the language comes into it.

Greek took the sign as lambda, and Latin took it from Greek as L, both keeping the sound. The three letters look progressively less like one another the further along you go, which is the ordinary result of centuries of separate handwriting rather than any deliberate redesign. The sound and the position in the sequence stayed put while the shapes drifted.

The character is encoded at U+080B.

As a numeral labat is thirty, and it is one of the letters a reader meets often in a manuscript colophon, where a scribe writing out a year has to build the number from the letters available to him. The alphabet gives him nine units, nine tens and four hundreds and nothing else, so a date of any size is a small piece of arithmetic laid out in letters.

The consonant itself is among the most stable in the family. Where the throat letters have weakened in the Samaritan reading tradition and two others have shifted their sound entirely, l has moved nowhere. In a script where the interesting letters are the ones that changed, this is one of the ones that did not.

The Samaritan script has a distinctive look that comes from how it is made. It is written with a reed, and the reed is held so that the strokes are weighted along the top of the line, with lighter strokes hanging below. The result is angular and strongly horizontal: a block of Samaritan text has an almost continuous upper edge, and the letters read as a row of forms suspended from it rather than as shapes sitting on a baseline. Nothing joins. Every letter is drawn separately and finished before the next one is begun.

There is a formal book hand, used for scrolls and liturgical manuscripts, and there are less formal hands used for letters, notes and inscriptions, but the gap between them is narrower than in the scripts that developed a true cursive. Because the letters do not connect, speed changes the weight and the finish of a stroke rather than the structure of the letter, so an informal Samaritan hand stays legible against the formal one in a way an Arabic or a Latin cursive does not.

Printing and then digital type arrived late for this script and had to abstract a set of shapes out of a handwritten tradition that varied. Modern Samaritan fonts, and the alphabet charts taught in the community, are that abstraction. They are faithful, and they are not the whole of it: a manuscript page carries variation that a typeface flattens, which is a reason to look at the manuscripts rather than at the chart if the question is what the script actually looks like.