Samaritan Punctuation Bau

Bau marks the preceding passage as a respectful appeal.

After a word group, bau tells the reader to hear that passage as a respectful appeal. Other Samaritan punctuation guides pauses and expressive delivery, chiefly in religious reading. The angled stroke is not separately encoded, so fonts may draw it differently.

Distinctive Samaritan script features appear by the third century CE; sentence-break marks predate expressive signs such as bau. The wider system has Syriac parallels, perhaps through imitation; manuscript use varies, and some exact functions were later forgotten.