Syriac Letter Rish

It writes the Syriac tongue-tip r sound.

Rish is one of the letters used to spell Syriac. If someone sends just ܪ, read it as a letter sample or fragment until the surrounding word or passage makes its role clear.

Where did the Syriac script come from?

It grew from Aramaic writing used around Edessa.

One proposal links early Syriac with Palmyrene, another Aramaic script associated with Palmyra, through a shared source in the Seleucid kingdom of Syria, ruled by successors of Alexander. Other accounts stress northern Mesopotamian Aramaic scripts, so the exact route is debated. The earliest distinctively Syriac inscription is the Birecik stone, dated 6 CE; another from Serrin is dated 73 CE.

A Syriac parchment from Dura-Europos in the 240s is a bill of sale. The first dated Syriac manuscript, from 411 CE, shows regular calligraphic Estrangela, a rounded writing style. Christianity helped Syriac grow into a language of literature and church worship; Syriac writing reached Central Asia and China by the end of the 8th century. East and West Syriac developed different systems of dots, especially for marking vowels, during the 7th–12th centuries.

Why does ܪ look different?

Writing style, joining, and dots all affect its shape.

Syriac is written from right to left. Estrangela, East Syriac, and West Syriac are three styles of the script, and their letter shapes can differ substantially. In a word, ܪ can join to the preceding letter, changing its form, but does not join to the following letter.

In older writing, dalath and rish shared an undotted shape. Later writing distinguishes them with a dot: rish takes the dot above, dalath the dot below. Unicode also has ܖ, the dotless Dalath-Rish character, preserving the ambiguous form.