Mim ࠌ

Mim is the thirteenth letter of the Samaritan alphabet and carries the numeral value forty. It writes a plain m. The name is the inherited Northwest Semitic one behind Hebrew mem, and the gloss usually attached to it, water, is a reconstruction from the word rather than a meaning anybody using the script wrote down.

The letter is a workhorse of the grammar. It is the preposition meaning from, whether written as a separate word or attached to the front of one. It forms the participle of a large class of verbs. It supplies the masculine plural ending, so it closes a great many nouns, and it opens a productive pattern of nouns that name a place or an instrument. Between them these jobs put mim into more words than most letters reach.

In the square Hebrew script this is one of the five letters with a separate final form, a closed square shape used at the end of a word. Samaritan writes one shape everywhere, so a Samaritan word ending in m looks the same at the end as it would in the middle.

Greek took the sign as mu, and Latin as M, both keeping the sound and roughly the position. The character is encoded at U+080C.

The shape has an unusually visible history. In the earliest Semitic writing this sign was drawn as a zigzag, and it is that zigzag the traditional gloss of water is read out of. Greek mu kept the zigzag plainly and the Latin M keeps it plainer still, so in this one case the European letters preserve the ancient outline more legibly than either Semitic script that descends from it directly. That is a corrective to the assumption that the oldest surviving script must look most like the original: a letter can drift in shape while the tradition carrying it does not break.

Samaritan scribes developed a device that has no close parallel in the neighbouring manuscript traditions. In a Torah written in columns, a scribe could arrange the text so that particular letters fell into alignment in the vertical space between two columns, and those aligned letters, read down the page, spelled out a message: the name of the scribe, the name of the person the copy was made for, a date, and a formula. The device is called the tashqil, and it turns the layout of the page into a signature.

It is a considerable feat of planning. The wording of the Torah is fixed and cannot be adjusted to make the letters fall where they are wanted, so the scribe has to control the width of the columns and the spacing of the words across many pages at once in order to land the right letters in the right places. A tashqil is therefore evidence of a highly developed craft, and it is also a documentary source: it dates and attributes manuscripts that would otherwise be anonymous, which is exactly the information a catalogue of Samaritan manuscripts most needs.

The habit says something about how the community regards the copying of the Torah. The text itself is not altered by a single letter; what carries the scribe is the shape of the page around it. A colophon at the end of a book announces its maker in the ordinary way. A tashqil hides him inside the geometry of the book and leaves him to be found.