Singaat ࠎ

Singaat is the fifteenth letter of the Samaritan alphabet and carries the numeral value sixty. It writes a plain s. Its name is the least obviously related of the twenty-two to its Hebrew counterpart, samekh, which is a reminder that letter names travelled with the signs and were reshaped by the mouths of the people using them, while the position in the sequence and the numeral value did not move at all.

The letter is among the less frequent in the alphabet. Hebrew and its relatives have more than one way of writing an s sound, and the distribution between them is a matter of the history of each individual word rather than of any rule a reader can apply, so singaat turns up in a limited stock of vocabulary and is absent from long stretches of text. That scarcity is itself useful to a palaeographer. A letter that appears rarely gives fewer chances to date a hand, and its form in a manuscript is correspondingly more valuable when it does appear.

Greek took the sign for xi and gave it the cluster ks, a sound the Semitic letter never wrote. That is one of several places where Greek fitted a borrowed sign to a sound of its own rather than to the sound it came with.

The character is encoded at U+080E.

The twenty-two letter alphabet gives three signs to the s-like sounds, singaat, tsaadiy and shan, and asks one of them to do the work of two. The ancestor language had more distinctions in this area than the alphabet has letters for, and the languages that used the alphabet had already merged some of them, so the signs are a compromise made once and inherited ever after.

The consequences run through the whole family. The letter that writes sh is read as sh in some words and as s in others, and the square Hebrew script eventually invented a dot to mark which, a device the Samaritan script does not have and does not need, because the reading tradition carries the information. Arabic, which fixed its alphabet later and for a language that had kept more of the distinctions, writes the same territory with a different set of letters, and the correspondences between an Arabic word and its Hebrew or Samaritan cousin in this area are regular but not obvious.

What this means for anyone reading the letters as evidence is a caution. The alphabet is not a phonetic transcription and was never meant to be one. It is a set of signs adequate to write a particular language at a particular moment, retained afterwards through several centuries of sound change in more than one community. Reading it as a direct record of pronunciation, in any period, produces confident conclusions the evidence does not support.