History of the alphabet many letters the Proto-Sinaitic alphabet had nor what their alphabetic order was. Among its descendants, the Ugaritic alphabet had 27 consonants, the South Arabian alphabets had 29, and the Phoenician alphabet 22. These scripts were arranged in two orders, an "ABGDE" order in Phoenician and an "HMĦLQ" order in the south; Ugaritic preserved both orders. Both sequences proved remarkably stable among the descendants of these scripts. The letter names proved stable among the many descendants of Phoenician, including Samaritan, Aramaic, Syriac, Arabic, Hebrew, and Greek alphabet. However, they were largely abandoned in Tifinagh, Latin and Cyrillic. The letter sequence continued
Hebrew alphabet was an abjad consisting only of consonants, but is now considered an "impure abjad". As with other abjads, such as the Arabic alphabet, during its centuries-long use scribes devised means of indicating vowel sounds by separate vowel points, known in Hebrew as "niqqud." In both biblical and rabbinic Hebrew, the letters can also function as "matres lectionis", which is when certain consonants are used to indicate vowels. There is a trend in Modern Hebrew towards the use of "matres lectionis" to indicate vowels that have traditionally gone unwritten, a practice known as "full spelling". The Yiddish alphabet, a modified version