Gamal ܓ

Gamal is the third letter of the Syriac abjad and writes g. It joins on both sides and takes the full set of positional shapes. Like beth, dalath, kaph, pe and taw it carries a hard and a soft reading, and the soft reading is a voiced velar fricative, the sound written gh in transcriptions of Arabic. Its numeral value is three.

Its name is the inherited word for a camel, one of the Northwest Semitic nouns that the letter names preserve. The noun describes a sign of the older linear alphabet and no longer describes anything in the Syriac form, which is drawn quite differently in Estrangela, in Serto and in Madnhaya and looks like nothing in particular in any of them. The entry here is for the letter, not for one hand.

Gamal has a further use outside Syriac itself. Where the Syriac letters are used to write Arabic, a practice known as Garshuni, a separately marked gamal stands for the Arabic jim. That sign belongs to Garshuni and is not a twenty-third letter of the alphabet, which is why the count of the Syriac abjad stays at twenty-two however many marked variants a particular manuscript shows. The distinction matters when reading a character inventory: a list of encoded Syriac characters is much longer than a list of Syriac letters, and the extra signs are borrowings, ligatures and positional variants rather than additions to the alphabet.

Garshuni is the writing of Arabic in Syriac characters, and it is one of the clearest signs of what happened to the Syriac churches after Arabic became the spoken language around them. A community whose liturgy and learning were in Syriac letters went on using those letters for a language they were not designed for, adding marks where Arabic had sounds the alphabet could not write. Gamal with its own added mark is the standard answer for the Arabic jim.

The practice ran for centuries and produced a large body of manuscripts: letters, chronicles, theology, medicine and scripture, in Arabic, in Syriac letters, often written by scribes for whom both were ordinary. Catalogues do not always distinguish them clearly, and a text can be shelved by its script rather than by its language.

Three things follow for anyone counting Syriac letters. First, a marked gamal in a Garshuni manuscript is a Garshuni convention and not a letter of the Syriac alphabet. Second, the same is true of the marked teth used for another Arabic sound, and of the marked letters that Sogdian and Persian writers added when they took the Syriac script east. Third, the alphabet itself did not change: twenty-two letters, in an order inherited from Aramaic, with the numeral values that order fixes.

The habit of extending rather than replacing is what let one alphabet serve so many languages without ever being renumbered.