The Vowel Signs and the Marks Beside the Letters

The twenty-two letters are consonants, and a Torah scroll is written with consonants alone. That does not mean the Samaritan tradition has no way of writing vowels. Over the manuscript centuries it developed a set of marks placed above and below the letters, used in books other than scrolls to record features of the reading that the consonantal text leaves out. They are diacritics rather than letters: the community counts twenty-two letters, and the marks are not among them.

The set is distinct from the Tiberian pointing familiar from Jewish bibles, and it is not a borrowing of it. It grew out of the Samaritan reading tradition and records that reading, so a pointed Samaritan manuscript is a written trace of how the community recited the text at the time and place the manuscript was made. The character standard encodes the marks separately from the letters for exactly this reason, and one of them is named after this letter, a sign for a y sound inserted in reading that the consonantal text does not write.

For anyone working with the manuscripts the practical value is high. Pointing is the only way a reading tradition leaves a dated record of itself, and comparing the marks in manuscripts of different periods is one of the few ways to test whether and where the recitation has shifted. For a reader of a scroll it changes nothing, because the scroll carries none of it and the recitation is learned from a teacher.