Rish ܪ

Rish is the twentieth letter of the Syriac abjad, with the numeral value two hundred. It writes r. It joins only to the right, so the letter following it starts a fresh connected group.

Rish shares a single skeleton with dalath and the two are told apart only by a point, written above the stroke for rish and below it for dalath. The earliest writing leaves the point off, and that undifferentiated shape is recorded as a sign of its own so that editions can reproduce old hands faithfully. Dalath and rish are the pair a modern editor most often has to decide about when transcribing an early manuscript, since the point is the whole of the difference.

Its name is the inherited Northwest Semitic word for a head, the same word that stands behind Hebrew resh, and the same word from which the opening of the Hebrew Bible takes its name. Rish stands at the twentieth place in the inherited order, and the three letters after it close the alphabet.

Estrangela, Serto and Madnhaya each draw rish in their own way, and the point sits with it in all three. This entry is for the letter, which all three hands write.

Rish is also one of the four letters that carry the hundreds, holding two hundred, so it does duty as a figure in the quire signatures and marginal numbers of manuscripts as well as in words. And it is one of the eight Syriac letters that do not join to the letter after them, which means a rish is always followed by a visible break, a small extra cue for a reader deciding whether the shape in front of them is rish or dalath.

The Peshitta is the standard Syriac Bible, and it is the reason the script matters far beyond the communities that use it. It is one of the oldest translations of the Christian scriptures, made from Hebrew and from Greek, and it is read in the Syriac churches to this day.

That gives Syriac manuscripts a particular kind of authority in textual scholarship. A translation made early is a witness to what its source said at the time it was made, so a Syriac reading can bear on a question about a Greek or Hebrew text. Syriac also preserves works whose originals are lost: early Christian writing that survives in this language and in no other, and Greek philosophy and medicine that reached Arabic through Syriac translators.

All of that rests on copies, and copies rest on legibility. A script in which two letters differ by a single dot, in which the earliest writing omits the dot, and in which the vowels are not written at all, is a script that puts weight on the reader and on the copyist. The pointing systems, the vowel marks and the careful hands of the manuscript tradition are the answer that was worked out to that problem over centuries.

Rish and dalath are the smallest and sharpest instance of it. Two letters, one shape, one dot, and behind the dot a difference between words. The whole apparatus of Syriac pointing begins there.