The Syriac Abbreviation Mark is a

Unicode Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology Technical standard, standard for the consistent character encoding, encoding, representation, and handling of Character (computing), text expre ...

Control character In computing and telecommunication, a control Character (computing), character or non-printing character (NPC) is a code point (a number) in a character encoding, character set, that does not represent a written symbol. They are used as in-band ...

(U+070F) that forms part of the

Syriac script The Syriac alphabet ( ) is a writing system primarily used to write the Syriac language since the 1st century AD. It is one of the Semitic abjads descending from the Aramaic alphabet through the Palmyrene alphabet, and shares similarities with ...

block. In Syriac, words are sometimes written in an abbreviated form, omitting some of the last letters. In such cases, a special

overline An overline, overscore, or overbar, is a typographical feature of a horizontal line drawn immediately above the text. In old mathematical notation, an overline was called a '' vinculum'', a notation for grouping symbols which is expressed in m ...

is drawn over some of the final letters of the abbreviated word. Traditionally, this overline has a point at each edge and a point in the middle, but sometimes a plain overline was used. Another use of this overline is to mark numbers: in Syriac numbers are written using numerical values which are assigned to letters (similarly to the

Gematria Gematria (; he, גמטריא or gimatria , plural or , ''gimatriot'') is the practice of assigning a numerical value to a name, word or phrase according to an alphanumerical cipher. A single word can yield several values depending on the cipher ...

system in

Hebrew Hebrew (; ; ) is a Northwest Semitic language of the Afroasiatic language family. Historically, it is one of the spoken languages of the Israelites and their longest-surviving descendants, the Jews and Samaritans. It was largely preserved ...

). The sequence of letters used to write the number are also marked by the overline. To implement this special overline in Unicode, a special control character was conceived: the Syriac Abbreviation Mark (or SAM), described in section 9.3 of the Unicode Standard. It is inserted in the stream of characters just before the first letter which should be marked with the overline (visually, to the right of it, since Syriac is a right-to-left script).

OpenType OpenType is a format for scalable computer fonts. It was built on its predecessor TrueType, retaining TrueType's basic structure and adding many intricate data structures for prescribing typographic behavior. OpenType is a registered trademark o ...

also has stch “feature tag” to pave the way of proper rendering. The rendering engine should put an overline on all subsequent Syriac script letters, until the first character which is not a Syriac letter or diacritic. However, several computer environments do not render this character correctly, but show rather a substitution

glyph A glyph () is any kind of purposeful mark. In typography, a glyph is "the specific shape, design, or representation of a character". It is a particular graphical representation, in a particular typeface, of an element of written language. A g ...

where it appears in the character stream. Here is an example containing the SAM, just after the Syriac letter

Alaph Aleph (or alef or alif, transliterated ʾ) is the first letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician , Hebrew , Aramaic , Syriac , Arabic ʾ and North Arabian 𐪑. It also appears as South Arabian 𐩱 and Ge'ez . These letter ...

(first letter to the right): ܐ܏ܒܓܕ The image below shows the correct way this should be rendered:

References

{{reflist Control characters Unicode Syriac alphabet

See also

References