Zain ܙ

Zain is the seventh letter of the Syriac abjad, with the numeral value seven. It writes z, a voiced alveolar sibilant, and unlike the six letters with hard and soft readings it has no second value. It joins only to the right, so the letter after it begins a new connected group.

In the Estrangela hand zain is a short stroke, and a beginner confuses it readily with dalath and with rish, which are also short strokes distinguished by a point. Learning which of the three a point belongs to, and which of them carries no point at all, is one of the first things a reader of manuscripts has to settle. In the later hands the three are drawn further apart, but the family resemblance survives.

Its name is the inherited Northwest Semitic word for a weapon, and zain stands at the same seventh place it holds in Hebrew, where the cognate letter is zayin. The place and the numeral value come from the same inheritance, the twenty-two letter Aramaic sequence that Syriac took over unchanged.

Because it joins only to the right, zain breaks a word into more than one connected run, and it is one of eight Syriac letters that do so. The others are alaph, dalath, he, waw, sadhe, rish and taw. Those breaks are part of what makes joined Syriac legible rather than one unbroken stroke.

Syriac is a joined script, written right to left, and most of its letters connect to the letter on either side. Eight do not connect to the letter that follows: alaph, dalath, he, waw, zain, sadhe, rish and taw. After one of these the pen lifts and the next letter starts a fresh connected group.

This is not a defect and it is not decoration. It gives a page of Syriac its visible structure. Word boundaries in Syriac are marked by spacing, which in a cursive hand can be slight, so the breaks inside words are what keep a line from reading as one continuous stroke. A practised reader uses them to segment the line before recognising any individual letter.

Zain is one of the eight, which matters more than usual for this particular letter, because zain, dalath and rish are so similar in the older hand. A reader who has already identified a break knows something about what can be sitting at that break, which narrows the field before the shape has to be judged at all.

The same behaviour appears in Arabic, where a comparable set of letters joins only to the right, and in Mandaic, where a comparable but not identical set does. The three scripts inherited the habit along with the alphabet, and each settled its own list. Comparing the lists is one of the few places where the descent of these scripts can be seen in how they are written rather than in what order the letters come.