Classical Syriac

Estrangela

Western (Serto)

Only the first part of the Serto sample is pointed.

Eastern (Modern Aramaic Koine)

Letters

Combining marks

Punctuation

Symbols

Other

Vowel sounds

Consonant sounds

	labial	dental	alveolar	post- alveolar	palatal	velar	uvular	pharyngeal	glottal
stops & affricates	p b		t d			k ɡ	q		ʔ
ejective			tˤ
fricatives	f v	θ ð	s z	ʃ		x ɣ		ħ ʕ	h
ejective			sˤ
nasals	m		n
approximants, trills, flaps	w		l r		j

Among most Assyrian Neo-Aramaic speakers, the pharyngeal ʕ is pronounced as ʔ or ∅, or geminates a previous consonant.

Tone

Syriac is not a tonal language.

Structure

tbd

Vowel summary table

The following table summarises the main vowel to character assigments.

The table shows only visible vowel components in unvocalised text. The hyphens (read RTL) indicate the position within a word.

For additional details see vowel_mappings.

Here is the set of characters described in this section, grouped by general category.

Post-consonant vowels

Vowel handling in classical Syriac is very simple. There are no dedicated vowel letters. Instead, the 5 basic vowel sounds are written using 3 consonants employed as matres lectionis.

Standalone vowels

Standalone vowels at the beginning of a word, or word internally are generally all represented by ܐ, however that may or may not indicate a vowel following a glottal stop. In word-initial position, Wiktionary transcriptions seem to consistently indicate that ALAPH represents a glottal stop, but not so in other locations.

ܐܒܓܕ

ܐܝܣܪܐܝܠ

Vowel sounds to characters

This section maps Syriac vowel sounds to common graphemes in the Estrangela orthography. Click on a grapheme to find other mentions on this page (links appear at the bottom of the page). Click on the character name to see examples and for detailed descriptions of the character(s) shown.

Only sounds for which matres lectionis exist are described.

Consonant summary table

The following table summarises the main consonant to character assigments.

The right column shows the use of diacritics to disambiguate various sounds.

For additional details see consonant_mappings.

Basic consonants

All the letters in the Syriac block are consonants. There are 22 basic consonant letters, but several may represent more than one consonant sound.

ܣ has a separate code point for its final form, ܤ, like Greek sigma or several letters in the Hebrew block.

Hard and soft sounds

The following consonant symbols represent two sounds, one 'hard' and one 'soft'. The hard sound is an unaspirated plosive, the soft sound is an aspirated fricative or w.

The intended sound of the letter can be made explicit using diacritics, however they are optional (and none of the Wiktionary lemmas used here as examples employ them).

Hard form. A high dot indicates the hard form. The code point to use is 0741.

ܦ݁ܐ pē

Soft form. A low dot indicates the soft form. The code point to use is 0742.

ܐܠܦ݂ ʾālap̄

An East Syriac addition. Late and modern East Syriac texts use 032E to indicate a fricative form of pē,w ie. ܦ̮

Alternative glyphs. Danielsd reports that the dots can also be written as small circles, and mixed freely with the above dot diacritics in West Syriac grammar books to indicate the hard/soft pronunciation of plosive letters.

These can be represented by the Unicode code points 030A and 0325.

Repertoire extensions

Isolated forms

Isolated versions of 3 letters, such as may be found in counter styles, are usually presented as a doubled letter, using intial and final forms, ie. ܟܟ k ܡܡ m ܢܢ n

Comparison of shapes

The glyphs used to represent consonants in Estrangelo, Eastern, and Western Syriac can be significantly different. The following list compares them, top to bottom, in that order.

Baseline elongation

Syriac uses the Arabic character ـ to lengthen the baseline.

Silent letters (talqana)

0747 is used in the Eastern style to indicate letters that are not pronounced. It is frequently used in the modern Aramaic koine to bridge difference in dialects. For example, the following is pronounced baθar in some modern dialects, harking back to the classical pronunciation, but bar in Urmi and the koine.

ܒܬ݇ܪ bt݇r after

The letters ܐ, ܥ, ܗ, and ܝ, when included for etymological reasons, are often silent, though without using the talqana.n

The Unicode Standard says that 0748 is used in a similar way.u

The Western style uses 0331, eg. the above example would be written ܒܬ̱ܪ bṯr

0711 is used in East Syriac texts to indicate an etymological alaph, eg. ܩܲܖ݄ܡܵܝܑܼܬ̣ qaḋ‒݄māyˈit‒̜ It maps to nothing in West Syriac.

Onsets

Consonant clusters in syllable onsets are simply written using a sequence of consonant letters.

Finals

No special mechanisms are used to write syllable or word final consonants.

Consonant clusters

There is no equivalent to the Arabic sukun to indicate clusters of consonant sounds. (Although the Arabic character can be used when transliterating Arabic text in Syriac script.)

However, the short a and ɪ vowels are only used in closed syllables, so if they are followed by an intervocalic consonant, it indicates that the consonant is doubled,d eg. compare ܣܲܡܵܐ sămaʾ samma poisonܣܵܡܵܐ samaʾ saːma portion

Consonant sounds to characters

This section maps Syriac consonant sounds to common graphemes in the Estrangela orthography. Click on a grapheme to find other mentions on this page (links appear at the bottom of the page). Click on the character name to see examples and for detailed descriptions of the character(s) shown.

Sounds listed as 'infrequent' are allophones, or sounds used for foreign words, Sanskrit, etc.

More diacritics

The list below shows all the additional diacritics: click on the letter to see detailed description; click on the arrow to find an in-context description that groups together similar diacritics.

These diacritics are used in unpointed as well as pointed text.

Disambiguation marks

Diacritics can be used to disambiguate the pronunciation of otherwise identical-looking words. For example:

ܩ̇ܛܠܬ qᵵlt I killed ܩܛ̣ܠܬ qᵵlt you (m.) killed ܩܛܠܬ݀ qᵵlt she killed

Dots

0307 and 0323 are used to disambiguate certain letters, morphemes or words, eg. compare ܡ̇ܢ ṁn man who ܡ̣ܢ ṃn mɪn from

The dot is also written over the 3rd person feminine suffix.

ܘܗ̇ -wḣ -o

And the masculine and feminine personal pronouns and their corresponding demonstratives.

̇ܘ ḣw aw ܗ̇ܝ ḣy aj

Feminine marker

0740 is a feminine marker used with ܬ to indicate a feminine suffix. East Syriac fonts should render as two dots below the base letter, whereas West Syriac fonts render as a single dot to the left of the base, eg. compare in the Eastern (top) and Western (bottom) orthographies in fig_feminine (click on the images to see the underlying code points):

Other diacritics

0743 and 0744 are accent marks.

Found in ancient manuscripts, 0324 has a grammatical and phonological function.

0304 and 0331 are used for various purposes, ranging from phonological to grammatical and orthographic markers.^d Nelson et al. describe the following uses for the lower line: "the sublinear line can be used to: 1) indicate that the letter under which it lies is not to be pronounced, 2) disambiguate between the passive imperative verb from the passive past since they are homographs, and 3) to indicate that the letter under which it lies is to be pronounced with a shewa".n,8

032D is used as a digit marker.u

0749 is associated with music, and 074A is a diacritic cross.

Diacritics for Assyrian/Turoyo

̃␣̰␣ܑ␣݅␣݆

Combining tildes are used in modern Syriac styles to modify the sound of a consonant, eg. to represent sounds not found in non-classical Syriac.

These marks are called ܡܓ̰ܠܝܢܐ maǧlīyānā, and they are combined with a base consonant to represent non-classical sounds in modern dialects or to change the sound for foreign words. It is applied to 4 consonants in Assyrian Neo-Aramaic, and 2 in Turoyo.

The maǧliyana is written using one of 2 code points from the Combining Diacritic Marks block: 0303 or 0330.

The superscript alaph indicates etymological information (see novowel), but is only used in the East Syriac style.

0745 and 0746 are used in Turoyo  for letters not found in Classical Syriac, eg. ܐ݅ ܦܪܥܓܬܐܔ݆ܰܥܓܰܗ̈

Managing text direction

Unicode provides a set of 10 formatting characters that can be used to control the direction of text when displayed. These characters have no visual form in the rendered text, however text editing applications may have a way to show their location.

202B (RLE), 202A (LRE), and 202C (PDF) are in widespread use to set the base direction of a range of characters. RLE/LRE comes at the start, and PDF at the end of a range of characters for which the base direction is to be set.

In Unicode 6.1, the Unicode Standard added a set of characters which do the same thing but also isolate the content from surrounding characters, in order to avoid spillover effects. They are 2067 (RLI), 2066 (LRI), and 2066 (PDI). The Unicode Standard recommends that these be used instead.

There is also 2068 (FSI), used initially to set the base direction according to the first recognised strongly-directional character.

061C (ALM) is used to produce correct sequencing of numeric data. Follow the link and see expressions for details.

200F (RLM) and 200E (LRM) are invisible characters with strong directional properties that are also sometimes used to produce the correct ordering of text.

For more information about how to use these formatting characters see How to use Unicode controls for bidi text. Note, however, that when writing HTML you should generally use markup rather than these control codes. For information about that, see Creating HTML Pages in Arabic, Hebrew and Other Right-to-left Scripts.

Expressions & sequences

A sequence of European numbers, for example a range separated by hyphens, runs from right to left in the Syriac script (and Arabic or Thaana scripts), whereas for Persian, Hebrew, N’Ko or Adlam scripts it runs left to right.

fig_range shows some Syriac text, which is right-to-left overall, containing a numeric range that is ordered RTL, ie. it starts with 240 and ends with 250.

The Unicode Bidirectional Algorithm automatically produces the expected ordering when a sequence or expression follows Syriac characters. However, a sequence that appears alone on a line doesn't benefit from this, so to make the text appear correctly for Syriac you should add 061C (ALM) at the start of the line (see fig_alm). This is an invisible formatting character.

Similar special ordering is applied to numbers in equations, such as 1 + 2 = 3, for Syriac language text.

For additional details on how direction of ranges interacts with surrounding characters and separators used, see the section Expressions & sequences in the Modern Standard Arabic orthography description.

Font styles

There are 3 main writing styles: maḏnḥāyā (ܡܲܕ݂ܢܚܵܝܵܐ) (eastern), ʾesṭrangēlā (ܐܣܛܪܢܓܠܐ), and serṭā (ܣܶܪܛܳܐ) (western).

• All ancient manuscripts used Estrangelo. West and East Syriac text uses it for headers, titles, and subtitles. It's also the current standard for Western scholarship.n,6
• Serto is used in West Syriac texts, Turoyo, and Garshuni (Arabic written with Syriac).
• Madnhaya is used for East Syriac and Swadaya (Aramaic) texts, and in West Syriac texts for headers, titles and subtitles.n,6

The phonetic repertoire is largely the same, as are the code points for the consonant letters, but the shapes of the letters and code points and shapes of vowel diacritics can vary significantly. fig_writing_styles shows the differences using typical fonts for each style.

fig_writing_styles_noto shows the same text, but this time using Noto fonts, which tend to show up better the essential differences in the shapes of the letters (since the font design is harmonised), at the cost of neutralising much of the distinctive flavour that each of these writing styles carry.

See the list of letter shapes compared side-by-side for Estrangelo, Eastern Syriac and Western Syriac.

Another difference between the 3 writing styles is that Estrangelo is rarely pointed, whereas modern texts in Turoyo or Assyrian are typically fully-vowelled (to the point that they can be regarded as alphabetic, rather than abjads).

Font styles different from the main text are often used for headings.

Cursive text

Syriac is cursive, ie. letters in a word are joined up. Fonts need to produce the appropriate joining form for a code point, according to its visual context, but the code point used for a given letter doesn't change.

Seven letter shapes join only to the right. All other shapes join on both sides.

Cursive joining forms

The cursive treatment produces only minor changes to glyph shapes in most cases. A small number of letters, however, exhibit noteworthy changes, especially in word final positions. fig_joining_forms and fig_right_joining_forms show all the basic shapes in Assyrian and what their joining forms look like. Noteworthy variations are highlighted.

In modern Syriac ܣ joins on both sides, but in the earliest Estrangelo texts it only joined to the right.

Managing glyph shaping

200D (ZWJ) and 200C (ZWNJ) are used to control the joining behaviour of cursive glyphs. They are particularly useful in educational contexts, but also have real world applications.

ZWJ permits a letter to form a cursive connection without a visible neighbour.

ZWNJ prevents two adjacent letters forming a cursive connection with each other when rendered.

fig_joiners shows an example of a transcription of a manuscript.

Context-based shaping & positioning

Context-based shaping

See just above for shaping related to cursive joining.

Ligatures. Apart from the shaping required to support cursive behaviour, there are also optional and font-dependent word-final ligatures.

The vowel diacritics have been omitted from the examples below, but their presence doesn't affect the ligation process.

fig_serto_lig shows a selection of ligated forms for the Serto writing style.

	alaph + lamadh	ܐܠܗܐ
	gamal + lamadh	ܓܠܦ
	gamal + e	ܐܓܥܠ
	yudh + taw	ܘܕܠـܝܠܐܝܬ
	lamadh + space + alaph	ܕܬܬܠ ܐܢܬܬܐ
	lamadh + alaph	ܡܠܐܟ݂ܗ
	lamadh + lamadh	ܚܠܠܝܢܝ
	nun + alaph	ܐ̱ܢܐ
	nun + alaph	ܥܠ ܐܘܟܝܣܛܝܐ
	sadhe + nun	ܕܘܨܢ

fig_east_lig shows a similar list for the East Syriac writing style.

	he + yudh	ܐܠܗܝ
	taw + alaph	ܬܫܟܘܚܬܐ
	taw + yudh	ܟܚܬܝ
	dalath + final alaph	ܨܕܐ

One ligated pair, representing jʰ, has its own code point: ܞ.

Word boundaries

Syriac uses spaces between words.

There are no one-letter words. One letter conjunctions and prepositions such as ܘ w are continguous with the word they precede.

Graphemes

Punctuation & inline features

Phrase & section boundaries

،␣؛␣܆␣܇␣.␣؟

Modern Syriac uses ASCII punctuation and punctuation borrowed from Arabic. For separators at the sentence level and below, the following are used.

phrase	، ؛ ܆ ܇
sentence	. ؟

For other punctuation marks, see otherPunctuation.

Observation: Articles in Syriac Wikipedia tend to show ܀ at the end of each paragraph.

Bracketed text

(␣)

Syriac commonly uses ASCII parentheses to insert parenthetical information into text.

	start	end
standard	(	)

Mirrored characters

The words 'left' and 'right' in the Unicode names for parentheses, brackets, and other paired characters should be ignored. LEFT should be read as if it said START, and RIGHT as END. The direction in which the glyphs point will be automatically determined according to the base direction of the text.

The number of characters that are mirrored in this way is around 550, most of which are mathematical symbols. Some are single characters, rather than pairs. The following are some of the more common ones.

(␣)␣<␣>␣[␣]␣{␣}␣«␣»␣‹␣›

Abbreviation, ellipsis & repetition

܏␣܊

Syriac abbreviation mark

070F (SAM) is a formatting character which is used to indicate that a sequence of letters is an abbreviation, as shown in fig_sam_abbrev.

The line would ideally have a small circle at the start, middle and end, but it has become common for computers to apply just the line, without the dots. With dots, however, is preferable for liturgical texts.n,9

The line normally starts to the left of the nearest tall letter and runs to the end of the abbreviation. To apply this using Unicode, add the SAM formatting control immediately before the character where the line begins. The application should then continue the line automatically to the end of the word.

U+072C SYRIAC LETTER TAW

U+070F SYRIAC ABBREVIATION MARK

U+072B SYRIAC LETTER SHIN

U+0712 SYRIAC LETTER BETH

U+0718 SYRIAC LETTER WAW

Eastern Syriac abbreviation

In Modern East Syriac texts a punctuation mark is placed at the end of an incomplete word to mark a contractionn,10 n,44, eg.

ܩܫ܊ qʃ.

Line & paragraph layout

Page & book layout

Online resources

1. Syriac Wikipedia – This is Classical (Edessan) Syriac, aka Lishana Atiqa/Sipraya or Kthobonoyo. The title page says it's Classical Syriac. No font is assigned for the page. The style guide advises against use of vowel and other diacritics apart from syame. Note that each paragraph ends with ܀.

References