Hebrew alphabet written from right to left. It has 22 letters, five of which use different forms at the end of a word. In the traditional form, vowels are indicated by the weak consonants Aleph (), He (), Vav (), or Yodh () serving as vowel letters, or "matres lectionis": the letter is combined with a previous vowel and becomes silent, or by imitation of such cases in the spelling of other forms. Also, a system of vowel points to indicate vowels (diacritics), called niqqud, was developed. In modern forms of the alphabet, as in the case of Yiddish and to some
Yemenite Hebrew the Qamats () and Tseri (). He argues that the pronunciation of Yemenite Hebrew was not only uninfluenced by Arabic, but it influenced the pronunciation of Arabic by those Jews, despite the Jewish presence in Yemen for over a millennium. Among the dialects of Hebrew preserved into modern times, Yemenite Hebrew is regarded as one of the forms that retains very many features of Hebrew as used in ancient times, particularly Tiberian Hebrew and Mishnaic Hebrew. This perception is motivated in part by the fact that Yemenite Hebrew preserves many consonant sounds represented by individual letters in the Hebrew alphabet