Shan ࠔ

Shan is the twenty-first letter of the Samaritan alphabet and carries the numeral value three hundred. It writes the sh sound. The name is the inherited Northwest Semitic one behind Hebrew shin, glossed as a tooth, a reading reconstructed from the word.

This is one of the letters that carries more than one sound of the ancestor language. Two distinct consonants of the earlier system fell together in the alphabet at this point, and the merger is why some words that look unrelated across the Semitic languages are in fact cousins. In the square Hebrew script the ambiguity was eventually handled by adding a dot, placed to the right for sh and to the left for s, a device invented long after the letters themselves. The Samaritan script never adopted it and does not need it, because the reading tradition supplies the distinction.

Greek took a sign in this area as sigma, but the sibilants crossed over in the borrowing: the Greek letter that inherited this shape took its name from a different Semitic letter, and the tangle has been argued about for a long time without a settled result. It is a rare case of the Greek adaptation, elsewhere so regular, being genuinely confused.

The character is encoded at U+0814.

The English word Samaritan comes from the region of Samaria, which is how outsiders have named the community since antiquity. The community does not name itself that way. Its own term for itself is built on a root meaning to keep or to guard, and it understands the name as the keepers, meaning those who keep the Torah. The first letter of that name is this one.

The difference between the two names is not a matter of translation. One locates a people by where they live and the other by what they do, and the second is a claim: it says the community is defined by its custody of the Law given to Israel, and that it has kept it. The community regards itself as Israelite, descended from the northern tribes, and its account of the split with Judaism turns on which mountain God chose and on which community remained with the original practice. The Jewish account of the same events is different. Both are old, both are internally coherent, and neither is going to be settled by the other.

An atlas has to make a choice about which name to use, and the honest choice is to use the received English name, because that is what a reader will search for, while recording the community name and what it means. Naming a living people the way they name themselves is not a courtesy. It is a piece of information about who they take themselves to be, and it belongs in the record beside the label everyone else uses.