Rish ࠓ

Rish is the twentieth letter of the Samaritan alphabet and carries the numeral value two hundred. It writes a plain r. The name is the inherited Northwest Semitic one behind Hebrew resh, glossed as a head, which is a reconstruction argued from the word rather than a meaning recorded by anyone writing the script.

The r of the Semitic languages behaves unlike the other consonants in one respect that matters to a reader. In several of the reading traditions it resists doubling, so where the grammar would ordinarily double a consonant and shorten the vowel before it, a word containing this letter lengthens the vowel instead. The effect is systematic, and it is not visible in the consonantal text at all, which makes it one of the many things a reader has to bring to the page rather than take from it.

Greek took the sign as rho and Latin took it from Greek as R, both keeping the sound and the position. The Latin letter acquired its tail somewhere in that transmission, which is why R and rho look related but not identical. The Samaritan form belongs to the other branch and resembles neither.

The character is encoded at U+0813.

The root behind the letter name carries more than the gloss suggests. It means a head, and from that a beginning, a chief, a first thing, and the first word of the Torah, the word the community copies at the head of every scroll it makes, is built on it. The letter is not that word and the name is not a claim about the text; the two share a root, as a great many Semitic words do. It is a fair illustration of how these names work. They are ordinary words of the language rather than labels invented for the alphabet.

A reader of Hebrew can learn to read Samaritan quickly, because the two scripts agree on everything except the shapes. The alphabet has the same twenty-two letters in the same order with the same numeral values, the direction of writing is the same, and the language of the Torah text is the same. What has to be learned is a set of twenty-two new forms and a short list of differences, and the differences are the interesting part.

There are no final forms, so the five Hebrew letters that change shape at the end of a word do not change here. There is no dot inside a letter and no dot on top of one, so the distinctions the square script marks that way, hard against soft and sh against s, are not written and are carried by the reading tradition instead. Words are separated by a written mark rather than only by space. And the letter names are not all the ones a Hebrew reader knows: six of the twenty-two differ, and each difference records something about how the community says the letter.

The largest adjustment is not on the page. It is that the text being read is not the same text. The Samaritan Pentateuch differs from the Masoretic text in a great many places, so a reader who knows the Torah by heart in one tradition will find the other saying something else more often than they expect. That is the point at which reading the script stops being a matter of decoding letters and starts being a matter of reading a different book.