Yes. And looking at page 5 of:
http://www.orindalodge.org/fonts/kadosh_samaritan_manual_1_10.pdf
The rendering rules are different for each script since there are cases where one Samaritan glyph maps to two different Hebrew glyphs and so these glyphs are repeated at other code points in the font.
All that is different is that the Samaritan uses only one form for each letter while Hebrew sometimes uses two. Since the Hebrew final letters are not contextually rendered, but are separately encoded, it is necessary to double-encode some Samaritan glyphs *in order to use Samaritan as a cypher for Hebrew*. If you wanted to use Samaritan as something other than a cypher for Hebrew, you presumably wouldn't use the final form characters. So Samaritan may be a glyph variant of a subset of Hebrew.
Now, that said, I am very keen to have the Samaritan shin encoded, because this is used as a mark in the apparatus critici of the BHS and possibly other Bible editions (in BHS it used in citations of Pentateuchi textus Hebraeo-Samaritanus secundum). I'd be perfectly happy to see it encoded as a Letterlike Symbol, since it is being used as a symbol and not as a Samaritan letter.
John Hudson
Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com Vancouver, BC [EMAIL PROTECTED]
What was venerated as style was nothing more than
an imperfection or flaw that revealed the guilty hand.
- Orhan Pamuk, _My name is red_
