Classical Syriac

Estrangela 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		t͡ʃ d͡ʒ	c ɟ	k ɡ	q		ʔ
ejective	pˤ	tˤ		t͡ʃˤ	cˤ	kˤ
aspirated	pʰ	tʰ		t͡ʃʰ	cʰ	kʰ
fricatives	f v	θ ð	s z	ʃ ʒ		x ɣ		ħ ʕ	h
ejective			sˤ
nasals	m		n			ŋ
approximants, trills, flaps	ʋ w		l r ɾ		j
ejective			lˤ rˤ

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

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.

Consonants representing vowels (matres lectionis)

Three consonants can also represent vowels. They are ܐ [U+0710 SYRIAC LETTER ALAPH], ܘ [U+0718 SYRIAC LETTER WAW] and ܝ [U+071D SYRIAC LETTER YUDH]. For details, click on the glyphs in this list.

Standalone vowels

Standalone vowels at the beginning of a word, or word internally are generally all represented by ܐ [U+0710 SYRIAC LETTER ALAPH], 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

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.

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 [U+0723 SYRIAC LETTER SEMKATH] has a separate code point for its final form, ܤ [U+0724 SYRIAC LETTER FINAL SEMKATH], 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   ݁  [U+0741 SYRIAC QUSHSHAYA].

ܦ݁ܐ pē

Soft form. A low dot indicates the soft form. The code point to use is   ݂  [U+0742 SYRIAC RUKKAKHA].

ܐܠܦ݂ ʾālap̄

An East Syriac addition. Late and modern East Syriac texts use   ̮ [U+032E COMBINING BREVE BELOW] 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   ̊ [U+030A COMBINING RING ABOVE] and   ̥ [U+0325 COMBINING RING BELOW].

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.

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

Baseline elongation

Syriac uses the Arabic character ـ [U+0640 ARABIC TATWEEL] to lengthen the baseline.

Silent letters (talqana)

 ݇ [U+0747 SYRIAC OBLIQUE LINE ABOVE] 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 [U+0710 SYRIAC LETTER ALAPH], ܥ [U+0725 SYRIAC LETTER E], ܗ [U+0717 SYRIAC LETTER HE], and ܝ [U+071D SYRIAC LETTER YUDH], when included for etymological reasons, are often silent, though without using the talqana.n

The Unicode Standard says that  ݈  [U+0748 SYRIAC OBLIQUE LINE BELOW​] is used in a similar way.u

The Western style uses    ̱ [U+0331 COMBINING MACRON BELOW], eg. the above example would be written ܒܬ̱ܪ bṯr

ܑ   [U+0711 SYRIAC LETTER SUPERSCRIPT ALAPH] is used in East Syriac texts to indicate an etymological alaph, eg. ܩܲܖ݄ܡܵܝܑܼܬ̣ qaḋ‒݄māyˈit‒̜ It maps to nothing in West Syriac.

Plurals (syame)

̈   [U+0308 COMBINING DIAERESIS] is used to represent the Syriac syame (ܣܝ̈ܡܐ), which indicates plural nouns, adjectives and participles. It is needed because many plural words would otherwise look the same as the singular word, eg. the following could be read as either malkā king or as malkē kings.

ܡܠܟܐ mlkʾ malkā king

Instead, the plural form can be written

ܡܠܟ̈ܐ mlk̋ʾ malkē kings

Although it's not strictly needed for non-regular words, it is also used for them, eg. ܒܝܬܐ bytʾ (baytā) houseܒ̈ܬܐ b̋tʾ (bāttē) houses

Some modern usage, however, omits this diacritic when vowel marks are present, because it is redundant.

An author can place this mark above any letter in a word, but if the word contains one or more of　ܪ [U+072A SYRIAC LETTER RISH] the mark is generally placed over the one which is nearest the word end, and replaces the single dot above it, eg. ܢܘܟ݂ܪ̈ܝܐ nwk‒̣r‒̈yʾ nuxrajɪ modern

Other likely locations include low rising letters, and letters near the middle or end of a word.w

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

Feminine marker

 ݀ [U+0740 SYRIAC FEMININE DOT​] is a feminine marker used with ܬ [U+072C SYRIAC LETTER TAW] 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):

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.

‫ [U+202B RIGHT-TO-LEFT EMBEDDING] (RLE), ‪ [U+202A LEFT-TO-RIGHT EMBEDDING] (LRE), and ‬ [U+202C POP DIRECTIONAL FORMATTING] (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 ⁧ [U+2067 RIGHT-TO-LEFT ISOLATE] (RLI), ⁦ [U+2066 LEFT-TO-RIGHT ISOLATE] (LRI), and ⁩ [U+2069 POP DIRECTIONAL ISOLATE] (PDI). The Unicode Standard recommends that these be used instead.

There is also ⁨ [U+2068 FIRST STRONG ISOLATE] (FSI), used initially to set the base direction according to the first recognised strongly-directional character.

؜ [U+061C ARABIC LETTER MARK] (ALM) is used to produce correct sequencing of numeric data. Follow the link and see expressions for details. 

‏ [U+200F RIGHT-TO-LEFT MARK] (RLM) and ‎ [U+200E LEFT-TO-RIGHT MARK] (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 ؜ [U+061C ARABIC LETTER MARK] (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.

Writing 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 [U+0723 SYRIAC LETTER SEMKATH] joins on both sides, but in the earliest Estrangelo texts it only joined to the right.

Managing glyph shaping

‍ [U+200D ZERO WIDTH JOINER] (ZWJ) and ‌ [U+200C ZERO WIDTH NON-JOINER] (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.

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 [U+071E SYRIAC LETTER YUDH HE].

Context-based positioning

There are sometimes clashes between diacritic marks which have to be resolved by repositioning one of the diacritics, or sometimes producing a different solution.

For example, marks are usually centred vertically over or under a base character. If, however,   ݂   [U+0742 SYRIAC RUKKAKHA] appears below ܕ [U+0715 SYRIAC LETTER DALATH] when the glyph for that has a dot below, the mark is moved slightly to the right, as shown here.

If   ̈   [U+0308 COMBINING DIAERESIS] appears above　ܪ [U+072A SYRIAC LETTER RISH] the mark replaces the single dot above the base letter.

In this example, the RISH character carries not only a combining diaeresis, but also a vowel mark, which is moved upwards to ride above the former.

Grapheme boundaries

tbd

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.

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 ܀ [U+0700 SYRIAC END OF PARAGRAPH].

References