At 04:33 -0800 2004-01-16, Peter Kirk wrote:
Michael, you seem to have written "shan" rather than "shin" twice independently in the subject line, so presumably this is not a typo. Do you actually hold that the letter is called "shan" rather than "shin"? Do you have any evidence for this? Are you basing this on the table at http://www.the-samaritans.com/script.htm? As this table looks rather old, possibly copied from a 19th century book, it would be good to check that these are the names in current use by the Samaritan community.
We have a number of sources for Samaritan character names, including a font made by a modern Samaritan.
SAMARITAN LETTER ALAF SAMARITAN LETTER BIT SAMARITAN LETTER GAMAN SAMARITAN LETTER DALAT SAMARITAN LETTER IY SAMARITAN LETTER BA SAMARITAN LETTER ZEN SAMARITAN LETTER IT SAMARITAN LETTER TIT SAMARITAN LETTER YUT SAMARITAN LETTER KAF SAMARITAN LETTER LABAT SAMARITAN LETTER MIM SAMARITAN LETTER NUN SAMARITAN LETTER SINGAT SAMARITAN LETTER IN SAMARITAN LETTER FI SAMARITAN LETTER TSADIY SAMARITAN LETTER QUF SAMARITAN LETTER RISH SAMARITAN LETTER SHAN SAMARITAN LETTER TAF
Meanwhile the scholarly world, for whose benefit the LTR symbol is being proposed, consistently refers to this letter as shin rather than shan - although the SIL proposal of June 2003 for this character avoided the problem by proposing the name SAMARITAN PENTATEUCH SIGN.
That may well be appropriate.
(I note that you are still awaiting a public reply to http://www.the-samaritans.com/forum/display_message.asp?mid=388).
We had a response from someone there offline with whom we are talking; but haven't heard from him again in a while. Another contact is going to do some library digging for us in Berkeley.
Thanks for the clarification. That looks a good set of names for the actual alphabet. They should of course be checked along with the whole proposal with the Samaritan community.
If it is decided not to encode a separate Samaritan Pentateuch sign, I would suggest giving an alternative name of "Samaritan shin" as well as "Samaritan Pentateuch sign", to avoid confusing scholars who may use this name. I also wonder if its use is strictly restricted to indicating the Samaritan Pentateuch, or if it may sometimes be used to refer to other Samaritan texts, or to the Samaritan script, dialect or religious tradition more generally. I was trying to check whether any of the samples in the SIL proposal have a wider reference, but scripts.sil.org is currently offline.
-- Peter Kirk [EMAIL PROTECTED] (personal) [EMAIL PROTECTED] (work) http://www.qaya.org/
