Syriac alphabet Syriac alphabet The Syriac alphabet ( ) is a writing system primarily used to write the Syriac language since the 1st century AD. It is one of the Semitic abjads descending from the Aramaic alphabet through the Palmyrene alphabet, and it shares similarities with the Phoenician, Hebrew, Arabic and the traditional Mongolian scripts. Syriac is written from right to left in horizontal lines. It is a cursive script where most, but not all, letters connect within a word. Spaces separate individual words. All 22 letters are consonants, although there are optional diacritic marks to indicate vowels and other features. In
Biblical Hebrew phonemes. After a sound shift the letters , could only mark one phoneme, but (except in Samaritan Hebrew) still marked two. The old Babylonian vocalization system wrote a superscript above the to indicate it took the value , while the Masoretes added the shin dot to distinguish between the two varieties of the letter. The original Hebrew alphabet consisted only of consonants, but gradually the letters , , , , also became used to indicate vowels, known as "matres lectionis" when used in this function. It is thought that this was a product of phonetic development: for instance, *bayt ('house')