Aramaic Letters: Semkat

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The next letter of the Aramaic Alphabet is called Semkat, pronounced a little bit like "same cat", but with sem instead of same. It corresponds to the Hebrew letter Samech in the Hebrew Alphabet. The letters in the Aramaic Alphabet are almost identical to those in Hebrew, but have slightly different names and sometimes slightly different sounds. In this case, you can tell that the letters have similar names (Samech and Semkat) but are not quite the same.

  Aramaic audio: Listen to the sound of Semkat.

Here is what the Aramaic letter Semkat looks like:

Here is how to write Semkat:



 
Semkat is pronounced with a s sound, like the words Selah, serpent or slave.

Incidentally, if you are thinking that Semkat looks exactly like the Greek letter Sigma, only pointing to the left instead of the right, then you are exactly correct. This is not a coincidence. The Greek language took the Aramaic letters and wrote many of them the wrong way round, because they preferred to write from left to right instead of right to left. For example, the Aramaic letter Resh looks like the English r, but it is facing the other way. English copied the Greek letters, just as Greek copied the Aramaic letters! The world began with Hebrew and Aramaic letters!

Semkat has the Gematria (numerical value) of 60.

Practise writing Semkat in the grid lines below:










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